A Pale View of the Hills Kazuo Ishiguro

Every once in a while, a book surprises you on the way to its ending. After the first few pages of this book, I figured I knew what to expect - a well written realist novel about a displaced Japanese woman in England who reminisces about her youth while contemplating the choices her children have made. And for most of the book, that impression is borne out. It nicely describes the two countries, how people act and react, and what life has been like for this character throughout her time in both places.

The novel even does a very good job of replicating the varying syntax between English and Japanese - in the reminiscences, the dialogue does not flow as it would in English, and the translation is in some cases very literal, which makes the dialogue reflect the difference in thought patterns that speaking (and thinking) in another language requires.

Then, only ten pages from the end, the pronouns change. Where you expect 'she' there is 'the child' and where you expect 'you' there is 'we'. And all of a sudden you're unsure who is talking to whom, and when, and you start to realize that you have been taking what your narrator says at face value when perhaps you shouldn't have.

After all, the narrator of the story tells us more than once that perhaps her memory is faulty, perhaps she is mixing things up. But such a confession, such reluctance to appear certain, such a recognition of the false nature of memory, does the opposite of what the words should do. Instead of making the reader doubt the narrator, such qualification about the haziness of memory leads the reader to trust the narrator, after all, she has recognized that she's telling a story, and because she's telling a story, we're willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Then suddenly, the pronoun shift at the end introduces the possibility that not only did the narrator perhaps get some details wrong, leave some things out, change some names, be not as innocent as she seems, but maybe these omissions and alterations weren't accidental and we've been led to believe her a good person when perhaps she was lying about those details because she wasn't such a nice person after all, in fact, maybe she was a really nasty person.

I'm sure if you haven't read the book, all this sounds a bit confusing, and you might be wondering what the deal is anyway, but from a narrative theory point of view, the ability of such a small thing - a few pronouns - to throw the entire preceeding narrative into doubt is pretty impressive.

I think I will need to reread this book to figure it out. And although when I first picked it up I didn't think it would be useful, it just might go onto the Contemporary Brit Reading list - at least as a subsidiary text.

The Celestial Omnibus and The Machine Stops E. M. Forster

The Celestial Omnibus is a delightful (did I just say delightful? ugh! but it really was sheer pleasure to read) short story about a boy who visits heaven and returns with wonderful stories that no one will believe. It's nicely crafted, concise, and highly imaginative... heaven is a sort of literary haven for heros, gods, and good writers. It's only about 15 pages, but lots of fun.

The Machine Stops is another short story that I'd read before. It was included in the Science Fiction Research Association anthology (published in the nineties). It tells of a machine dependent society that fails when the machine fails. Nothing real imaginative there, but Forster wrote it in 1928, when machine dependence had not reached the supercomputer-phase yet and I imagine it's warning was more potent at the time (and it also hadn't been done to death by then either). What I like about it is its bleakness about the whole possibility.

Both stories are found in the Penguin Selected Stories of E. M. Forster, so it's cheap to pick up. Even though these are the only two of the collection recommended to me, it's likely that I'll read more of them. And maybe one of his novels. I like the way he writes.

England, England Julian Barnes

One of the challenges for a reader with a book written about a country that she hasn't lived in before is frequently that there are references to cultural habits and practices, terms, or ideas, that she isn't familiar with but that are crucial to understanding the story. This book doesn't present any major problems in that category.

The book is about England, but it's about the England that tourists might be familiar with (at one point in the book there's a list of the top 50 things people think of when they think of England). So, it talks about people, places, and ideas a non-English person can understand. And it doesn't seem to stray from those (which of course makes me wonder what it IS like to read this book if you're English).

The book spends time philosophizing about history, sexuality, childhood, happiness, but the digressions aren't too long and most of them fit well with the narrative.

It's written in three sections - the first two I found very engaging. The last one, I was unconvinced by - not by the character, since she remained fairly consistent in the final section - but the political events that are supposed to explain what happened to England I found unconvincing. First, because they happen too rapidly to be believed - and the idyllic situation at the end, if it arose from such rapid social and economic change, would likely be highly volatile and unstable, as most regime changes are when they happen quickly. There certainly would be more aftershocks than are described. The second, because although one of the political alliances in the book might have seemed plausible when it was written in 1998, it is an unlikely arrangment after the events of the last few years. But that's history itself, and I can accept that when Barnes wrote it he could not have anticipated the political re-alignments of the last few years.

One other thing bothered me - it has nothing to do with the story, but the jacket blurb. I reproduce the blurb here:

Picture an England where all the pubs are quaint, the Royals behave themselves (more or less), and the cliffs of Dover are actually white. Now imagine that the principal national treasures - from Stonehenge to Buckingham Palace - are grouped together on the Isle of Wight.
This is precisely the vision taht Sir Jack Pitman seeks to realize: a "destination" where tourists can find replicas of Big Ben, Wembley Stadium, the National Gallery, Princess Di's grave, and even Harrods (conveniently located inside the Tower of London), and visit them all in the course of a weekend. As this land of make-believe takes on its own comic and horrible reality, Barnes delights us with a novel that is at once a philosophical inquiry, a burst of mischief, a hilarious romp, and a moving elegy about authenticity and nationality.

Okay, so what bugs me about this? Sir Jack Pitman is the driving force behind the vision of the Island, but he does not narrate the story at any point himself. The narration flips between omniscient narrator (a non-character telling the story) and narration by one of the characters... who is NOT Sir Jack Pitman but a woman named Martha. Not only is she the only character who gets to speak, she is the first and last character whose life we hear described. Why is she not important enough to go into the blurb? She's the one who most frequently embodies the "philosophical inquiry" of the blurb.

I find bad blurb writing annoying. After all, it should actually give me a good idea of what to expect. (I'm also not sure how the "burst of mischief" fits in - strikes me as more than just mischievous... but then again, I'm not English)

Glad I read it, but don't go run out and pick it up.