Review: Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

This book was getting lots of Likes in the Books of the Year lists published in English newspapers and magazines, so I bought it and read it with pleasure.

The 331 pages of my translation are broken into 62 chapters and most of those chapterettes are emotionally charged, strongly visualised, dramatic vignettes of life in a working class quarter of 1950s Naples. Think Bicycle Thieves or La Strada for the atmosphere – but also Romeo and Juliet. There is more than a hint of the Camorra and an edginess created by the shared belief of the main characters that terminal violence is the way to respond to disrespect – well, and pretty much anything else. It wasn’t ISIS which invented that idea.

The novel is about two girls growing up and the book takes them up to age 16 and the marriage of one of them, Lina, the closest friend and alter ego of the narrator, Lenù – the familiar form of Elena, thus casting the author Elena Ferrante as the Lenù of the novel.

But at least for this reader, Lenù is much less interesting than Lina, so much so that I would not be surprised if in reality Lina and Lenù were one person. In the novel, their paths diverge just because clever Lenù stays in the school system and begins to be separated from her community of origin whereas brilliant Lina is withdrawn from school and kept in the home and shoe repairer’s shop of her family. But for most of the novel, she stays one academic step ahead of Lenù – in Latin, Greek, English - by borrowing books from the local library. The phrase "My Brilliant Friend"is used by Lina about Lenù once in the book, and the title reciprocates the compliment but with more justice.

Lina is an Original, genius, tomboy and reckless, who as the novel develops bends to the demands of her community so that with no experience of independent life – just a rich and complicated inner world of reservation and critique -  she marries at 16. It is her less original friend who is kept away from that fate by school (as much as anything) and who by the end of the novel begins to see that she will need to break with her community and culture or origin. If you like, she sees that the way out is through the door – not through the inner emigration which Lina practices.

I suppose my recommendation of the novel rests on the fact that I will now go to the bookshop and buy the three books which complete the chronological series of “Neapolitan Novels”

Added 15 December 2015:

Volume Two, The Story of a New Name, takes the story of Lina and Lenù into their early twenties. Lina has a child and leaves her husband for a life of hard work and poverty; Lenù leaves Naples for Pisa, graduates from university and aged 23 publishes a novel. Once again, I felt that Lina and Lenù are two sides of one person. Lina's notebooks - entrusted to Lenù - provide a simple literary device which enables Lenù to know everything about her absent friend's life.

The chapterettes (125 in 471 pages) remain highly charged and constantly provide fresh material. At times, I visualised it as a TV soap opera or sitcom (without the com) - a fixed cast of characters leading dramatic lives. It lends itself to TV forms more than to treatment as a film - a film would have to edit out three quarters of the material

The volume ends dramatically, like its predecessor, creating the space for the third volume: 

Added 3 January 2016: The two final volumes follow the lives of both women into their sixties and now much more space is given to Lenù's narrative of her own life, which is both unsparing and defensive.

In volume three, I was puzzled by the disappearance of the Camorra and its replacement by an assortment of "fascists" and "criminals". To be honest, I wondered if the author had been spoken to and told to be more careful. Volume Four brings the Camorra back but in a way which rather confirms that feeling - Lenù's sister marries one of the two principal Camorrists of the first volume.

There is a lot here about Italian politics in the 1980s and the ways in which Italy was (and still is) a failed state which has never been able (for example) to offer a fit for purpose Justice system to its citizens and so has provided the space in which the Mafias continue to thrive. If the State won't offer you protection, then the Mob will: Lina is explicit about this at one point. As recently as  2011 The World Bank rated Italy 158 out of 183 countries "for the efficiency of its justice system in enforcing contracts", just three places above Afghanistan. [ See my review of John Dickie's Mafia Republic on this website, 21 July 2013]

There is lots, lots more and in the end perhaps too much: the narrative structure is really "and then and then and then ..." which doesn't create pace and which does not create emotional climax for the reader at crucial moments (as when Lina's young daughter disappears). The absence of authorial humour from any of the hundreds of scenes is striking.

The editing of these books is impeccable. I could find fault with only two things: the occasional use of pseudo-generic "he" by the translator and a reference at page 105 in volume 4 to "Thailand" where the context of 1980s political debate clearly indicates that it should read "Cambodia" at the time that it was the Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge.

Review: Ian McEwan The Children Act

England has an Establishment, utterly sure of itself, and most of its members live for part of the year in London where they circulate between interconnected club-like circles. Sometimes they seek out worlds outside their own, as when they go looking for sex or drugs. Sometimes, other worlds erupt into their closed lives in unexpected ways.

This is the second or third  novel in which Ian McEwan makes his story out of encounters between Establishment and Other. This time it involves a judge in the Family Division of the High Court and a teenage Jehovah’s Witness; in Saturday it took a distinguished neurosurgeon and a street criminal. 

Both are very readable books, with fine pacing and deft evocations of place and character. Scanning through McEwan’s backlist, I find I have read most of his novels and found only one to be a dud: Amsterdam, which got the Booker Prize, largely - I suspect - because the judges had screwed up a couple of years before when they did not give the prize to Enduring Love, a novel in a completely different class with a spectacular opening sequence.

The Children Act is a morally serious novel which manages to explore or touch upon a remarkably wide range of important issues: marital fidelity, enduring love, childlessness, loneliness, religious fundamentalism, what “the welfare of the child” might mean, the limitations of judicial procedures, the importance of classical music … All this in just over 200 pages (but the lines widely spaced). 

I was unhappy at only one (key) point (page 197) where the judge, Fiona, learns of the death of the young Jehovah’s Witness just before she goes on stage to play piano in an end-of-legal-term get-together and concert. Her performance is then turned into a requiem for the lost young man. I found this too contrived to be really effective.

But it’s still an excellent novel, well worth what will be a short read.

Review: Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

This is really three books in one.

The first part aims to shift the way we see the Holocaust. When something becomes familiar and taken-for-granted like the Holocaust, then it is always a good thing when someone tries to make us see it afresh. This Timothy Snyder does. He wants to produce two shifts (at least).

First, away from Auschwitz – a late and relatively minor Holocaust scene – and towards the Bloodlands of eastern Europe where mass murders, mainly by shooting, claimed the lives of over a million Jews in 1941 – 42. Waitman Wade Beorn's Marching into Darkness is the companion book for this part of the narrative. Unhelpfully, the book jacket design misses what Snyder is arguing and gives us the familiar railway tracks. Most Jews did not travel by train to die; they were rounded up where they lived and shot in local fields and forests by ordinary soldiers and locals as often as by specially trained killers.

Second, away from an emphasis on (Nazi or traditional) anti-semitism, as sufficient explanation on its own, and towards an understanding of the broader contexts in which people turn on their neighbours and kill them. In this broader context, Snyder emphasises eastern Europe as a world of shortages (land, food, clothes …) and a world of insecurity. The insecurity was dramatically increased by the wilful destruction of state structures by both Germany and the Soviet Union – in the worst cases, we find both of them attacking in rapid succession. When you destroy states – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – remove their leaders, their leading classes, their political parties, their armies, and so on, you turn citizens into stateless individuals, denied a Leviathan to protect them. Fear alone is enough to turn them against each other; anti-semitism channels the direction of pre-emptive violence in which those who have no prior or no profound ideological commitment willingly join.  

When the world becomes seriously insecure, the idea of killing your neighbour takes hold almost as if it is human nature. At the end of his book, Snyder briefly ( page 336) references the US-UK invasion of Iraq as an exercise in state destruction which functioned very much like the Nazi and Soviet invasions of 1941 – 42 in turning people into killers of their neighbours. Snyder singles out one phrase from a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and Stalin's Gulag to illuminate what he is trying to get at: "a man can be human only under human conditions" (page 341)

The second part of Snyder’s book takes us over familiar ground – some of it familiar because of his earlier book Bloodlands -  and takes us through thumbnails of how the Holocaust proceeded (or was halted) in different countries and how individuals responded to their generally complex and intolerable situations. This is all readable (and occasionally perhaps sentimental) but does not add to or shift the way we see things, except insofar as it seeks to confirm the role of state destruction in unleashing the Holocaust.

The third part is a short essay which seeks to draw Lessons from the Holocaust which will allow us to understand the way our world is now and what threatens it. The main theme here is the potential role of food and water shortages – brought about by climate change -  in turning people against their neighbours, seeking to expropriate and secure scare resources for themselves. I would have turned this short essay into something a bit longer; as it stands it feels a bit schematic, despite brief references to interesting examples (like the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s).

If you are pressed for time, read the first part of this book. If like me you think that we can never stop learning from our own recent history, read it all.

Review: Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

I think Michel Houellebecq is a very good writer - sometimes superb - but I don't think this is a good novel. It doesn't really work.

He imagines France a few years on from now (2022) electing a (moderate) Islamic President one of whose (less moderate) priorities is to islamicise - with the help of Saudi Arabian funding - university education. The events of the novel unfold through the eyes of a jaundiced professor who is cast, first, as an Outsider à la Camus: there is an obvious nod to the opening page of L'Etranger at page 174. But he is cast, second, as a faux naïf  who sits open mouthed (always nibbling at the canapés or the mezze) as others, more clued in politically, give him lessons in what is happening to France. These lessons take the form of set piece speeches, delivered by a secret policeman and a university rector to their audience of one. It is one of the drawbacks of a roman à thèse that you are forced into such desperate literary devices.

I should add that the narrator is also cast, third, as an academic expert on J K Huysmans, sufficiently distinguished to get the invitation to edit a Pléiade edition of his works. What Houellebecq writes about Huysmans is interesting and clearly knowledgeable; some university should probably give Houellebecq a doctorate for his thesis and overlook the novel.

Houellebecq can be an amusing writer when he wants to be but I am not sure - maybe my French isn't good enough - if he intends that we should be in fits of laughter as he brings his novel to a close. His narrator likes food and sex, preferably free but he will pay for both if necessary. He's a bit down on his luck when he is compulsorily retired from the new islamicised Sorbonne. But he is tempted back. He sees what is happening to those of his colleagues who have converted to Islam. They not only have the salaries, but new wives. The rector of the University has been given a 15 year old, very sexy, but also has an older wife who can cook, very well.

And so the narrator, after dutifully reading the little introduction to Islam provided,  discreetly enquires - If I accept the invitation to return, for how many wives would I qualify? Well, there is no obligation to take all of them, but we could probably offer you three. That settles it and, to the delight of his colleagues, our Vicar of Bray returns to his university post.

Review: Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

The old Aristotelian device of “unity of time, place and action” works for the novel as well as for the theatre. If you want to create dramatic tension, it’s probably the device of choice. But it has a downside. You can end up creating implausible coincidences – on the stage, it means that the hero or villain enters stage left at just the right moment – just fancy that! – and in the novel it means pretty much the same thing. Joseph Kanon’s novel has a bit of this dramatic clumsiness, even though (because it’s a spy story) you may be unclear whether it’s a hero or a villain who has just walked onto the page.

Like his novel, The Good German, which I reviewed here on 19 January 2015, Leaving Berlin is set in early post-war Germany – 1949, in fact. This setting is now a sub-genre with its own tropes. One of them is in danger of being over-used: the mass rapes perpetrated by Russian soldiers as they entered Germany from the east in 1944 – 45. These rapes were known about, condoned and even encouraged right up to the top – Stalin knew. They are now documented in history books to make up for omissions in histories written at a time when you didn’t write about such things. Novelists now use the stories and are in danger of over-using them as if dealing with a peculiarly Russian disorder.

But it wasn’t only Russian soldiers who raped. So did Allied soldiers, not on the Russian industrial scale but in a few cases amounting to atrocities, notably involving troops from the French colonies: see the Wikipedia page “Rape during the occupation of Germany” for an introduction. These Allied rapes are not used as a literary trope: the French were on our side and their troops were African.

The novel has what seems a sentimental moment straight out of Casablanca (pages 315 – 318) but Kanon then gives it an unexpected twist – after all, this is a spy novel and as such it works quite well.

Review: Clive Driscoll, In Pursuit of the Truth

I usually have a fairly straightforward response to a book; to this one, I don’t

London’s Metropolitan Police has a reputation for idleness, incompetence and corruption. And that’s just the official view from numerous enquiries and investigations into its conduct. I would add servility to the list. The Met. has never stood up to its political masters who, it seems, will tolerate the Met’s shortcomings so long as it jumps when told to Jump! Only recently, the Leader of the House of Lords Baroness d’Souza reported her deputy, Lord Sewal, to the Met. for possession of class A drugs: the evidence provided by newspapers photographs of him snorting what he obviously believed to be cocaine. The Met. were on the case very quickly and obliged the Baroness by breaking down the door to Lord Sewal’s flat, an event duly publicised in those same newspapers. Now had I phoned the Met. and reported a neighbour who I suspected of snorting coke, I think it would have been seen as a case of wasting police time. London, after all, is the cocaine capital of Europe (that’s official too). Busting Lord Sewal was a complete waste of police time –  it may have  ticked the box, We acted on the Information, but it was done to oblige. It's forelock tugging.

The Met. is a traditionally working class organisation and Clive Driscoll presents himself as just an ordinary London boy from a difficult background who, despite dyslexia, has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps into a 35 year career with the Met. The style of the book is aggressively uneducated. I don’t know if this is Clive Driscoll alone or as he has been crafted by a ghost writer. The effect is sometimes comic and sometimes toe-curling. I think it is a main reason why I sometimes felt, This is an Unreliable Narrator. (But the low point comes when Mr Driscoll, who aims quite a few appropriate shafts at Roman Catholic church officials - spiced with reports of coded hand signals they use between themselves - then tells you that he himself is a  … Freemason. That had me in stitches.)

You cannot be a Comic Cuts Dixon of Dock Green Copper and at the same time successfully take on some very difficult investigations and secure convictions. That is where the style of the narration clashes all the time with the stories it narrates.

DCI Driscoll’s lasting claim to fame and gratitude arises from the fact that he took on the “Cold Case” Stephen Lawrence murder (which dated back to 1993), secured the confidence of the murdered boy’s parents – who provide Prefaces to this book - and others who had been bitterly disillusioned by the mishandling of the case, and eventually secured two convictions in 2012.

Things went wrong on the Lawrence case very early on: one of the suspects was the son of a well-known criminal who just happened to have a working relationship with the policeman put in charge of the murder investigation and who saw to it that the investigation went nowhere, despite information and evidence all over the place. Exceptionally bad luck? No, not completely untypical of the Met. 

All this and a lot more is on the record. So too is the fact that having secured the convictions, the Met. responded to Driscoll’s success not with congratulations but by pushing him into compulsory retirement – hence this book which though it never presents itself as such is also his revenge.

All these negative things said, there are stories told here which are entirely credible, greatly to Mr Driscoll’s credit, and often enough are stark reminders of what life in an “Inner City” is like for many of its inhabitants. Some of the things narrated here deserve further scrutiny, since the UK’s laws of libel have often enough prevented the naming of names. Mr Driscoll’s book is at its most frustrating when he points his finger upwards to the “high ups” in the Met.

Review: Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

This is a very well written and very interesting book. It argues that the elderly frail and the dying can enjoy a better quality of life than they often do - and that will often enough involve less medicine than more. It will certainly involve asking the frail and the dying what their own priorities are.

Gawande contrasts nursing homes, organised like penitentiaries, unfavourably with assisted living where even the very frail can keep something like their own front door and the freedom to schedule their own time and occupy it in their own way. Likewise, he is more impressed with hospice care (including hospice care delivered at home) than with medical interventions which go on for too long and often reduce rather than improve quality of life.

The argument is built up through some very finely written informal case studies, including one of his own father. As a result, the book is very easy to read - though, of course, it deals with end of life issues which are often enough traumatic for those involved - the person who is on the way out and the family who will remain. He also looks in detail at the ideas of practical providers who have sought alternatives to over-medicalised, over-hospitalised management and intervention.

I felt that the argument Gawande advances is really more general than he indicates. Even before we get into frailty and end of life, modern medicine often offers us too much and expects us to take it. 

It is now routine, for example, to offer rather unpleasant and often risky procedures as the means by which certain things (usually cancers) can be ruled out. But a good specialist using his or her hands and collateral information could in at least some cases make a reasonably reliable assessment. I would like the option of declining the invasive procedure until I had had a judgment from a pair of hands that concluded there was a real cause for concern.

Likewise, with medication. It is not only the elderly frail who are over-medicated to the point where side-effects are worse than the problem being medicated for. Play-safe prescribing or prescribing-on-request puts many millions of people onto pills they don't really need. 

There are signs that the problem is being recognised and  that things are changing. I hope so.