A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman, 2012 

I suppose this would be called a comic novel. A lot of things happen that readers can laugh at. But humour relies on context and individual reaction, and so did my response to this book.

  I started read it in preparation for a trip to Scandinavia. I thought that it would show everyday life in contemporary Sweden in an entertaining way, and for that it was good. Set among a group of neighbours in a modern suburb, it describes directly and inferentially a small community and the minor or major issues that come up. Immigration, queer kids, bureaucratic obstruction, new technology are set against an underlying story of love and death in a cold climate. It shows a modern Sweden as part of 20^th century Euro-American culture, with a few specific Nordic quirks. It contains some passages of compassionate writing and empathy that are quite lovely, such as the poignant story of the relationship between Ove and his neighbour, expressed in the history of their car ownership.

  But I didn’t like Fredrik Backman’s writing. Essentially, this is a story about a grumpy old guy with a heart of gold. It’s a sentimental cliché. It’s a well-done sentimental cliché with some modernizing touches, and I can see why it’s popular. But for me it seldom rises above the cliché.

  And it is undermined by incidents that are over-done or that don’t ring true. The uniform white-shirted, heartless bureaucrats, for example, are cartoons. While it might be true that many employees providing government services are rule-bound and unfeeling, they are all human beings with individual interests and frustrations. It doesn’t make Ove’s story any more sympathetic to make them all automatons. And the story of the gay guy who comes to stay in Ove’s house because his father can’t deal with his homosexuality seems completely contrived, the kind of thing that someone would imagine when they don’t know any gay men’s coming out stories. Worse than contrived, it’s a plot device to bring a little more poignancy and humor into the story line. And then there are the cute kids who get through Ove’s grumpiness. And the stray cat that adopts Ove and lets him show his hidden warmth. Even, perhaps especially, his saintly wife. It’s all too much.

  Backman also reduces the text to very simple, elemental declarative sentences or half sentences, presumably to represent Ove’s way of thinking, which is also very elemental. This is effective in making a reader see how Ove thinks, but after a few chapters, it’s trite.

  What's critically annoying here is the mix of psychological insight presented in simple language offset by contrived sentimentality in an exaggerated style that is supposed to represent Ove's straightforward thinking. Perhaps if a few of the chapters were presented as short stories, this would be an interesting character study. But it is not enlightening when it turns him into a caricature or when character development relies on revelations that are little more than sentimental hooks.

  Perhaps I’m being as narrow-minded and judgemental as Ove. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t much like the book. But for me, it’s the worst kind of popular sentimentality, and it is not saved by the few insightful passages.

Roseanna

Maj Sjowall and Per Whaloo, 1965

This is a departure from the conventional crime novel, a very narrowly focussed police procedural. There are no clues to figure out, no elaborate settings or plots, no insight into the criminal mind. It simply traces the slow and painstaking steps of analyzing a murder, building up information and gradually identifying the suspects and then trying to find evidence to confirm a case. Except for the somewhat overdrawn final chapter, we have no idea what motivates the murderer. All this is, I suspect, much more like a real police case than the psychological profilers and intuitive detectives that we see so much today (at least in my television experience, and I don’t watch or read much criminal fiction because it just seems so overdone).

  For my temperament, this approach is interesting and satisfying, although I can imagine that for many readers it would be too dry. For the first three months of the plot, the police don’t even know who the victim is, until someone matches a missing person report from the USA to the Swedish murder. The story reproduces investigation reports and interrogations without extraneous description or comments on the reaction of those questioned. The reader has to piece together the details from the words reported. Even the interior monologue of the lead detective doesn’t advance the plot or contribute to understanding the crime. The pace is even more constrained by the time period, the early sixties when the only instant communication was the telephone, and investigators had to wait while documents were couriered from one place to another. Forensics are limited and high-tech doesn’t exist.

  In spite of this style, the novel is intriguing for the realistic portrayal of what an actual police investigation might be like in reality. This, to me, seems like the investigations that I read about in news media, when even with the benefit of instantaneous communications it takes weeks to get lab reports and months or more to build a case. Investigators’ hunches, both right and wrong, come from what the witnesses actually say or what’s in the evidence, not from brilliant intuition. And they have to be proven on the basis of evidence that will stand up in court. I expect that this is because the authors were journalists, and presumably has some knowledge of the realities of criminal investigation. Also, as Marxists, they want to see conclusions drawn from material fact.

  The characters are thinly drawn and the action is slow – although there is one sequence at the end when an intensity builds, the police lose track of the suspect and suspense is real. But the stories do give an interesting picture of a police investigation in a realistic Swedish setting at a particular time. I’m interested enough to want to read more in the Martin Beck series. 

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James, 1881

Alright, yes, this is slow-moving, detailed and introspective. Why does anyone read Henry James if that is not what they want?

But in addition to those qualities, it has wit and social satire involving real characters trying to work out their lives. Does it have less comic activity than that other wordy nineteenth century writer and satirist, Charles Dickens? Yes, but in place of Dickens’ comic caricatures, we have real characters, even the women. With James, I feel that I am exploring the complex choices of a variety of women characters who could be dealing with equally difficult choices today (unlike the one-dimensional ideals of Dickens’ women). The specifics of their choices may be different from contemporary conditions, but I can imagine these characters as people wrestling with modern issues.

  The book looks at the unusual marriage choices of a number of women – Mrs. Touchett’s life separate from a husband she seems indifferent to; Mme Merle’s unhappy marriage which has left her in relative poverty, reliant on the generosity of friends; the Contessa’s sham of a marriage to a philandering man she despises; Henrietta’s unmarried relationship with her admiring Bantling, which she eventually transforms into a conventional marriage; and at the centre, Isobel’s initial choice to reject two attractive offers before finally accepting the worst of her options.

  The first part of the book is taken up with Isobel’s background and character, focusing on her independence and unconventionality. She is a clever and thoughtful young woman who does not want to be tied into the restricted domestic life of most of the women she knows. Her observations are often sharp and witty. Drawn to her ambition and independence, and at the suggestion of her cousin Ralph Touchett, Ralph’s father leaves her a large inheritance.

  In her naivety, or her attraction to an intelligent worldly woman, Isobel is drawn into the circle of the interesting Mme Merle as someone who seems to live a life outside of convention but still within respectable society. She is charmed by Mme Merle’s sophisticated friend Gilbert Osmond, and takes him at face value, although Mme Merle has manipulated the situation to marry Isobel to Gilbert so that he can take advantage of her money. It’s not really clear why she marries Osmond, although there is the pressure of convention, and it later appears that they deceived each other in their reliance on social conventions. Both put on their best appearances and fell for what they saw in the other.

  When Isobel realizes that Gilbert has no feelings for her and intends only to keep her, like his daughter, as an attractive and useful addition to his chilling collection of beautiful objects, she concludes that her only choice is to live up to the marriage vow she made and live with Gilbert in misery. This seems an odd conclusion given the many different models among her friends and her willingness to reject convention. Her generosity of spirit perhaps impels her to stay in order to support Gilbert’s daughter, and fighting convention all the time is a hard choice, particularly when the unconventional relationships of her friends appears problematic and unattractive. Perhaps this is why she finally needs the excuse of Ralph Touchett’s illness to break with Gilbert.

  The ending is, of course, ambiguous. After the very touching scene of Ralph’s death, Isobel returns to Rome, either to submit to Gilbert or to confront him. The strength of her connection to Ralph, and her rejection (again) of Caspar Goodwood’s demand that she go with him, lead me to believe that she is going to break finally with Gilbert. She is a strong figure, and she knows her mind. I take it that she will go her own way, as she always has, and accept the consequences.
  As always, a fascinating, fully absorbing study by Henry James that rewards readers who are looking for thoughtful social and psychological insight.

River of Smoke

Amitav Ghosh, 2011

I finished reading the first volume of the Ibis trilogy surprised at the abrupt ending and eager to find out more about the complex lives of the characters that Ghosh had introduced his readers to. That storyline is so lightly glossed over here that I still want to know more about them; but that’s not how I feel about the characters in this book. The richness of character and setting that I liked so much in Sea of Poppies shifts to a new location with only a few of the original characters remaining. And some of the characters show up briefly at the beginning of the book never to reappear. I guess they are just holding space until they come back in the third volume, although perhaps it too will jump into something new.
  There’s still a lot of period detail, although more than once I felt that Ghosh was piling on details from his research that didn’t contribute much to the novel. There are some interesting items – the life of the traders in Canton before the Opium Wars, for example, and the elaborate gardens of the wealthy Chinese. But these are rather slight compared to the first novel. More serious, however, is the fact that the characters are, to me at least, less interesting and more contrived. Some of them, such as Neel, the Indian prince reduced to pretending to be a Bengali secretary, or Robin, the painter who seems to be there simply to narrate conversations in a voice other than the author’s, were never convincing or sympathetic. Only Bahram, the Indian opium trader who has risen to the elite of the Canton bourgeoisie, is interesting for his own story, and its end is a slow anti-climax.

  What is good here is Ghosh’s detailed depiction of the machinations and rationalizations of the British opium traders when the new Chinese governor moves to block the import and sale of opium. Ghosh reports on historical figures and gives them arguments from period texts. The convenient new philosophy of the invisible hand of free trade justifies a vast drug trade and wealth. Anything in violation of trade is anathema, in spite of criminal laws or the effect of drugs on the populace, in spite of the complete prohibition of similar trade in Britain. It’s interesting to see that a few traders argued against the trade on moral grounds, making their profits in other goods, although their objections are forcefully overruled by the majority. And while the traders demand that the Chinese government stay out of the market, they don’t hesitate to call on the British government to send gunboats to enforce their access to the market.

  The opium trade is the central issue of the book, but it also touches lightly on a variety of other moral issues, from family relationships, true identities and forgeries to the sex trade, all within the larger context of imperialism and commercial exploitation. But what is the convoluted storyline about the golden camellia? The unattainable, perhaps non-existent, mystery of the Orient?

  As in the first volume, the use of language adds an interesting note to the storyline. From nautical slang to the pidgin English that different groups of traders use to converse among each other, the language itself represents the complex relationships between the Indian, Chinese, English and international traders and labourers. The language both unites characters across cultural barriers, and divides them from each other and from a deeper understanding that comes with a shared language and culture. While I enjoyed sometimes stopping to look up unfamiliar words – to find, for example, that the non-Chinese are restricted to living in Fanqui-town, or White-ghost Town – the sense is clear enough that the language doesn’t slow down the narrative.

  So overall, some of the elements that made the first volume so interesting are still here, but I found the first volume much more engaging. I’m not sure I’d be looking for the third volume if this was the only one I had read.

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens, 1859 

I love reading Dickens, but I did not love reading this book. I doubt that it’s in the curriculum any more, but I can understand a blogger who recently wrote that he avoided Dickens for years after being forced to read it. True, it opens and closes on two of the most memorable, and quoted, sentences in English fiction, and it contains some stirring scenes. There’s also a satirical tone in many places, comparing the grandiose pretensions of the English nobility with the imperiousness of the French. The tone initially suggests some of Dickens’ usual humour, but it is far more bitter than usual with Dickens. This turns into the deep pathos of a broken man and his daughter, to be followed by the triumph of love (both familial and romantic), reversal and finally rescue and transcendence. The transcendence is big here.

  But it’s a general humourlessness and shallowness that makes the book hard to read for me. Dombey and Sons, the last Dickens novel I read, was perhaps equally somber in tone, but it had sympathetic characters and psychological depth. In Two Cities, the only sympathetic character is old Dr. Manette, wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille for 16 years and psychologically fragile when released. His friend, the banker Mr. Lorry, is surprisingly sympathetic as well, although a side character to the central events of the story. The other lead characters are so thinly drawn that they have no real presence. Lucie Manette is a typical Dickens heroine, devoting her whole life first to her father, then to her husband. Charles has apparently renounced his French title in disgust, but we know little about him beyond his nobility of character and courage. Both are idealized stereotypes that I never felt any connection to, so when they first find happiness, then tragedy, I found myself wishing they’d just get on with it and bring the story to its end.

  Even the minor characters, usually so interesting in Dickens, hold little interest. Jerry Cruncher and his young son seem to be there only to entertain the English working class readers, but they add nothing to the storyline. The French nobles seem to be deliberately drawn as indistinguishable archetypes, while the French revolutionaries are so exaggerated that they are more like scary nineteenth-century cartoons than even Dickens’ usual figures. Dickens, while acknowledging their oppression, portrays the residents of the countryside, and particularly the St Antoine district of Paris, as terrifyingly out of control, insane and diseased. This contrasts starkly with the orderliness of Lorry’s good English business sense, and the common sense of Miss Pross, Lucie’s nursemaid and friend. The French revolutionary mob is a scarecrow, built out of the most frightening elements, but a hollow creation.

  Was this because Dickens’ abhorrence and fear of the French revolutions, writing just 10 years after the wide-spread upheavals of 1848, drove him to choose to demonize everything about it? The novel seems to be as much a propaganda piece against working-class revolution, and in support of British stability, as it is a paean to true love and noble virtue. Unfortunately, this thought makes me suspect many of Dickens’ other popular works. Dickens is known for his depictions of the oppressed and impoverished life of the English working class, and this is reflected here in his many references to the extreme poverty and privation of the French peasants and labourers. But the reaction that he depicts in France is so ignorant and brutal, and unbalanced, that it appears to be a warning to English readers not to do anything rash in trying to overcome the conditions he depicts in England. The novel comes across as profoundly conservative and reactionary, and makes me wonder about his actual political leanings (particularly after becoming a wealthy property owner himself). Perhaps the most charitable reading of the novel is as a warning to the English upper classes to avoid oppressing the working class so much that they have no alternative but revolution. But I think his readers are more likely to be lower or middle than ruling class, so this message, if that’s what it is, is not well directed.

Book of Sands

Karim Alrawi, 2015 

Set in the so-called Arab Spring democratic revolution of Egypt in 2011, this is a rich book, full of allusions, metaphors and varied points of view. It’s also absorbing to read, suspenseful, mysterious, descriptive and peopled with interesting characters. It centres mainly around Tarek, a former political prisoner who is drawn to the social changes, but who, to protect his safety and his family, leaves Cairo for the remote mountain plateau of southwestern Egypt (I think –the geography is deliberately vague). The story also brings in his pregnant wife and her confused religious zealot brother; his somewhat precocious child; a former political partner; and the villagers they met when they lived in a prison camp in the same mountain plateau. With shifting points of view, timeframes and locations, it covers a lot within a very readable narrative, from modern urban Cairo to very traditional village life, with variations on each of these.

  It’s also rich with poetic metaphor that expands the story further. It opens with a plague of birds that infests Cairo, which suggests both a vast range of possibilities and liberties, but includes the raucous noise they make, drowning out theatrical productions, and the bird droppings that get on everything. Tarek is a modern storyteller who, perhaps ironically. makes figures and gives puppet shows for a living. He inspires his daughter with a variety of stories that seem ambiguous but delight her in her interpretation. One central story of the beautiful stone roses formed of salt crystals almost leads to his death when he treks into the desert to find her one. A repeating theme of mathematical certainties becomes a coded love poem when its formulae are given human variables. There is a twisted parallel in this, too, when a rationalizing fundamentalist finds ways to interpret the words of the Koran to justify his personal desires.

  While Karim Alrawi is clearly supportive of the revolutionary direction of the Egyptian crowds against the ruling corrupt dictatorship, he does not suggest that there is an easy transition to a more democratic future. In fact, one of his central metaphors is the babies that refuse to be born until they (or the times) are ready. His Islamic believers all seem to be ignorant or self-serving, but moving forward means fighting against them, too. If there are any Islamic characters who are more sympathetic, they seem to be mystics who don’t actively participate in the movement, although they perhaps give others an element of hope or connectedness to the future.

  This novel provides a complex and intriguing picture of a contemporary culture that is seldom seen beyond headlines. Although the Arab Spring is just a background for the novel, the story illuminates it from several points of view and gives an understanding of many different elements in Egyptian society that are at work. The depth of traditionalism, political conservatism, privilege and religion contrast with the strength of the forces for change. While the novel has a hopeful ending, it’s also possible to see in the forces depicted why the Egyptian revolution has become wrecked.

The Illuminations

Andrew O'Hagan, 2015 

Curiously, this book raises many questions similar to those of the last one I read (Little Bastards in Springtime, also published in 2015, and with a cover image that uses the same form). It deals with the stories that we tell ourselves about war and about living our lives.
  The contemporary war in this story is the British forces in Afghanistan in the early 2000s. (It was the Bosnian civil war in Little Bastards.) It’s complicated by a separate story in which a woman is losing her memories of her husband in the second world war. Both lines of this novel involve a lot of story-telling.
  Luke (a Scot) joined the British Army to follow his father who was killed in Ireland, a bit of complicated story telling in itself. He leads a company into an Afghan skirmish that goes badly. He no longer buys the stories (even the cynical ones the soldiers tell themselves), although he does play along with his mates when he meets them later – perhaps in order not to weaken their own faith.
  Anne’s story is more complicated still. A Canadian photographer who relocated to New York where she trained with Stieglitz, then relocated to England following World War 2, she forms a relationship with a photographer in Blackpool before moving to live in Scotland. She is inspired creatively by him, and has a relationship that leads to a child. Later we find out that the stories he has told her, and that she has told her family and perhaps believes herself, are not entirely true. But by the time of the novel, she is slipping into Alzheimer’s disease, confuses the past and the present, and seems happy to believe the stories that she has been telling everyone. To her, they are the reality, and happier than the life she has led.
  The two stories come together when Luke, Anne’s grandson, takes her to Blackpool, finds out the reality, and concludes that Anne can live the rest of her life happily in her idealized fantasy. He seems to accept that the stories in his own life might be okay too, if they help people cope.
  In spite of the interesting themes, and the polished prose in this novel, it didn’t do much for me. I found it too removed and I never felt drawn to the story or the characters. There is a distant, detached tone, and the story itself is just not very interesting. This may just be an idiosyncratic response, because I know the book is well regarded, and was nominated for a Booker prize. There are many good things about the book – O’Hagen has some poetic, precise descriptive language that is quite evocative. And he has a facility for shifting viewpoints around a scene, sometimes showing how two or three people see it within a single paragraph. His descriptions of Luke’s crew in the heat of Afghanistan, not sure who to trust, not knowing what’s ahead, and the sudden reaction when things go wrong, give what seem to be a very realistic picture of a military crew.
  But all of this, somehow, leaves me unengaged. When I compare it to the reaction I had to Little Bastards, it lacks the emotional response that Jevrem’s story drew out. Possibly young Jevrem is just a more relatable character than the older introspective Luke. And Anne is barely there except as a character that other people relate to, and most of her past seems absent. Perhaps this is the challenge of writing about a character whose past is evaporating.
  Overall, I found this novel unsatisfying, and I found myself eager to get through it.