Ever After Graham Swift

This is my second Swift novel. I read this one because it has historical elements to it that I think might be useful in my study of twentiety century British literature.

Bill Unwin narrates the events of his life, his research and muses on the correlations between the two. His wife recently committed suicide, and he tried to follow but survived. Thanks to his stepfather, a plastics manufacturer, he has a chair at a prestigious university (not sure which one) and is working on preparing the diary of a Victorian relative, Matthew, who left his wife and family after revealing to them (and his rector-father in law) that the theory of evolution had persuaded him to the point of losing his faith in creationism. His wife kept the notebooks, a love letter, and the clock that his father had built, passing the clock down to Bill and his wife Ruth (who died childless). Bill interprets this to mean that she still loved him when he died. Bill draws parallels between the family's sense of destiny and his own, and in particular, he wonders at his wife's profession of actress - a putting on of characters that other people see, but Bill thinks repeatedly of the woman he knew - the one who studied her lines by pacing through the backyard, smoking and gesticulating as she memorized and tried out out different versions of them.

Bill accuses/muses that his stepfather is guilty of a kind of reverse colonialism (Sam, his stepfather, is American, was carrying on an affair with his mother in Paris, when Sam's spy-father shot himself, either out of guilt caused by spying, or because his wife was having an affair).

Most of the narrative is a recollection, and in its telling, Bill seems to work through some of the parts of his grief. In other ways, the narrative seems to deny knowledge, such as when Bill tries to imagine why someone would kill themselves (even though he presumably should know why he tried). He frequently leaves words unsaid, represented by the "--" but it is always clear what word he has omitted. This activity does not introduce confusion or multiplicity into the text, it rather induces in the reader as sense of Bill's squeamishness in dealing with emotions and relationships - some of the more delicate parts of life.

In producing large parts of Matthew's 'diary', Swift introduces the inventor Brunel, the Victorian debates about God and evolution, and their attitudes toward nature and society, and it reproduces Victorian attitudes to life. In reading these passages, it is easy to forget that the did not exist outside this text, and the parallels with the angst that Bill is working through are frequently drawn. Some of the connections made are less clear. Bill grows up in Alderston, a town that had a reputation later for protest but the reason for the introduction of this parallel is not immediately clear.

Having just read Golding's The Paper Men, I find similar sentiments expressed by both protagonists - which begs an interesting question about the motivation/attitude of the author's writing the stories (Bill also sounds a lot like the narrator of Swift's Waterland).

The Player of Games Iain M. Banks

I read this book right about the same time I was reading some theory on gaming, which was actually an interesting juxtaposition, since there are plenty of places in this text where gaming itself is discussed from both a philosophical and practical player-oriented point of view.

Jurnau Gurgeh lives in the Culture, a society in which there is no need, no poverty, no battles, no strife and whose occupants challenge themselves by playing games and creating art (including terraforming). Jurnau's friends include Yay, a terraformer, and Chamlis, a sentient machine (most machines in the Culture are sentient). This society has evolved to the point where people no longer need to work - what little work they do is in the form of hobbies more than necessity and therefore they have developed elaborate games.

But Jurnau is getting tired of games; he finds them unchallenging and after he allows another sentient machine, Mawhrin-Skel to help him win a difficult game against a newcomer, Mawhrin blackmails him into helping the drone get back into Contact, the interstellar branch of the Culture. In return, Contact challenge Gurgeh to a game unlike any other. It is a game played by another culture, one that bases its entire way of life, its merit-promotions, positions within government and society, on who is the best game player. The supreme ruler of this culture, Azad, is elected every game cycle (four years) as the person who wins the game of Azad.

Gurgeh agrees to the lightyears-long journey to play this game where he encounters a culture much like ours, with all the strife, jealousy and fighting that is absent in his own Culture. He performs much better than expected, and although according to the media, he has officially withdrawn, he actually beats the ruling monarch, Emperor Nicosar. In playing the game through its many stages and elimination rounds, he comes to realize that the game is actually a battle between his Culture and Azad, and Nicosar also understands this, attempting to assassinate Gurgeh and everyone watching the game by allowing a natural firestorm to overtake the castle in which they are playing the final round.

As I said, game theory is found dispersed throughout the text; at one point, the narrator tells us that the games a society plays reveals "so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul". Makes me wonder what our games reveal about our souls?

Bringing Down the House Ben Mezrich

Book club book. Very popular. Had to request it from my library as interlibrary loan.

When I opened the fly leaf after getting it and read that this is the author's first non-fiction book and he's usually a fiction writer, I thought, 'Maybe I'll check out some of his fiction after reading this book'.

I'm not going to read any of his fiction. If he constructs a fictional story the way he constructs a non-fiction narrative, I will be bored to tears. I realize that sometimes when you're working with non-fictional material it's difficult to craft it into a narrative that people might want to follow. Sometimes it might not lend itself well to story telling.

But if you feel that the way to keep readers reading is to constantly hint that things might not turn out all rosy in the end, over and over and over again, well, then you're just not a very good storyteller.

Of course I know it's not going to turn out 'alright' in the end - if the MIT students that this book is written about were still fleecing Vegas casinos at the blackjack tables, well, they wouldn't be telling the world about it now, would they? That would give away their secrets and provide too much competition.

Now I'm not an expert in non-fiction prose - my work is primarily in fiction - but since when did it become necessary for the non-fiction writer to become an apologist? Over and over again, Mezrich defends card-counting as not cheating. Fine, great, if that's what you believe, great! But whether it's cheating or not should not get in the way of a good story. I'm willing to read about cheaters if it means I'm reading a good story. Hell, some of the best works of fiction I've read are told from the perspective of murderers and thieves. I don't need to condone the actions of the character in order to like the story.

But you have to be able to tell a good story! This is not a good story. It's interesting, true, but not in the I-can't-put-it-down kind of way, nor the all-my-friends-have-to-read-this-book kind of way. But, now I've read it and when the book club meets, I'll see if anyone can provide me with arguments to redeem it. For now, I'm sorry I spent time reading it.