Snowdrops - A D Miller

I remember this book when it came out.  I remember assuming it was another attempt to write a Russian crime thriller in the wake of Gorky Park.  That's what it looks like, after all.  I remember being surprised that a crime thriller should be nominated for the Booker.

That's what happens when your publisher lets you down with a stereotypical cover.  I mean to say, doesn't it look like every one of Philip Kerr's Gunther novels?  And focusing on the 'snowdrops' - bodies that pop up in the spring thaw - doesn't help, especially when there is only one of them in book, a character we have never encountered and whose only purpose is to be discovered when winter ends.

In fact, Snowdrops is a serious novel about corruption in post-Yeltsin Russia, where of course more or less everyone is corrupt.  It is a world Miller knows inside out, having been a journalist there between 2004 and 2007.  His hero Nick is an ex-pat lawyer, and therefore a corruption magnet.  His firm is blithely working on some complex sub-Abramovitch oil deal when Nick falls head over heels for young Masha, a woman fifteen or more years younger than him.  Through Masha he meets Katya, the sister-who-isn't, and Tatiana Vladimorovna, the aunt-who-isn't.  The affair starts with the first chill of winter and ends with the thaw when Nick's suspension of disbelief washes away with the snow and he realises how low he has sunk, how willingly he has been corrupted.

It's an important novel, then, which certainly deserved its nomination. 2011, in case you're wondering, was the year Julian Barnes won the Booker with The Sense of an Ending.  Miller is a serious and talented novelist, albeit he doesn't seem to have followed up on Snowdrops.  If and when he does, I'll be reading him.

The Green Road - Anne Enright

On the face of it, there's nothing that should appeal to me here. An Irish Tiger family divided and reunited? Blah, ug, kak! But magnificent writing, characterisation, compassion and insight can elevate the most hackneyed story into something fresh and new and inspiring. And Anne Enright has all of these in spades.

Again, on the face of it, there is nothing new or fresh about the characters - the demanding self-serving matriarch, the obligatory gay failed priest, the wanderer of the world, the second generation mammy tied in a perpetual tug-of-love with her own mother, and (ah-god-jaysus-no) the wannabe actress.  Enright enrichs the stereotypes by giving them their own sections of the book, each in its own specific time which cleverly helps to progress the over-arching narrative.  Some of these work better than others and I expect that different readers will prefer different siblings.  Personally, as a sated dramaturg, I would walk many a mile to avoid a petulant thirty-something actress in her cups.

Rosaleen, the widowed mother of this brood, is the last to have her story, and herein lies Enright's masterstroke.  We realise she too is a child, just an ageing one.  She demands attention just like Hanna, and Dan, and Emmet and Constance.  The difference is, she has hit upon a device for achieving her demands.  She announces, out of the blue, her intention of selling the family home.  That brings the children scurrying back to the Emerald Isle for Christmas.  They squabble and bicker and Enright lets us form the conclusion before she spells it out - they are all failures, all immature drifters.  Rosaleen leaves them to it, and wanders off to the Green Road itself, an emblem of Ireland's dewy past, an emblem of shared youth and hope.

The Green Road is something a masterpiece which easily transcends its somewhat hackneyed genre.  Enright is not the one who made it hackneyed and should not be blamed, or overlooked, for the sins of others.  After all, every one of us has a family, a childhood we can never truly escape, and an innate concept of something called home.

The Swag Man - Howard Jacobson

Swag Man is a short memoir/long article published as an Amazon Kindle Single by the Tablet Magazine (a new read on Jewish life).

The Swag Man in question, we assume, is Howard's father Max, a huckster on the Manchester markets, always on the verge of making millions or going bankrupt, but never quite managing either.  Howard, of course, was dragged into service for Max's routines, and had no aptitude for it whatsoever.  But the true hero, the Swag Man made spectacularly good, is Frank Cohen, apprentice to Max, hero to Howard, DIY entrepreneur, collector of YBAs and co-founder, in April 2013, of the free to enter Dairy Art Centre in Bloomsbury.

What Jacobson gives us, in under fifty pages, is a snapshot on Jewish advancement in Manchester in the second half of the twentieth century, the last time someone could rise from the street markets to a Cheshire mansion, or in the author's case, the Booker Prize and sub Stephen Fry national treasuredom.  Two decades of Blair and Cameron and that awful prune Clegg have put a thorough-going stop to social mobility.

The Siege of Krishnapur - J G Farrell

The second of Farrell's Empire Trilogy, and the second Farrell I have read, The Siege of Krishnapur is set during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, after which Britain could no longer contend that the subjugation of the Indian people was beneficent or paternal.  The residents of the fictional compound at Krishnapur have no knowledge of the native people, even those who live in the compound with them.  They do not hate or despise them, they simply do not regard them as human beings on the same plane as themselves.  The sepoys who lay siege are savage and are granted no more motives than the white ants that infest the residence library.

The characters are, on the surface, types, more than often than not referred to as the Collector, the Magistrate, the Padre.  But Farrell is much more subtle than this would suggest.  The Collector ends up using the collection to buttress the mud rampart, the Magistrate, once a radical Chartist, seems to welcome violent change although he still does his duty as de facto deputy commander of the compound.  The Padre, pillar of High Anglicanism, becomes an apocalyptic ranter, and the two medical men who should be working together to help the sick and wounded fight their own mini-war over the causes of cholera.

The problem - the only problem I had with this otherwise magnificent novel - was that the women were not as developed as the men.  I found it hard, in the final chapter, to work out which woman had married the various men.  The women weren't cyphers and it was compelling to watch Farrell dismantle their privileged femininity as the siege progressed; it was perhaps that they all had the same dilemma and thus were treated, like the Indians, as a whole.

Krishnapur, of course, won the 1973 Booker Prize whereas its predecessor, Troubles, which I enjoyed slightly more, was a contender for the Booker that Never Was in 1970 and was awarded the Lost Booker Prize, on the popular vote, in 2010, which was when I read it.

Half Blood Blues - Esi Edugyan

Another of the shortlisted novels for last year's Booker - also winner of the Scotiabank Prize 2011 and contender for the Orange Prize 2012 - this is a scorching idea.  Black American jazz musicians Sid and Chips find themselves marooned in Berlin when war breaks out and then, foolishly, stranded in Paris when the Nazis invade.  It's not necessarily so bad - black people are so rare in Germany that the Nazis haven't got them on their proscribed list.  But jazz is degenerate and half-bloods like boy wonder trumpeter Hiero Falk are degenerate in every sense.  In Paris there are lots of black jazz musicians, including Louis Satchmo Armstrong and his presumed mistress Delilah Brown, who is Canadian like our author.  But when the Germans invade and the locals flee Paris Hiero is mistaken for a Senegalese deserter.  And when the Germans arrive, well...  Hiero is captured.  Sid sees it all, and lives with the memory for 51 years, until someone makes a documentary about the legendary Hiero Falk.  Chips is in the film because he's aged into something of a legend himself.  Sid is the man who created the legend by stealing the wax recording of Hiero's Half Blood Blues, which went on to become a jazz classic.  He is also the guy who betrayed the young genius.

Back in Berlin for the premiere, Sid discovers that Chip has actually heard from Hiero.  He's amazingly still alive and living in Poland...

Sid narrates the tale and flashbacks in hip jazzy argot, which is great and, as far as I could tell, pitch perfect, though you'd think some new terms might be coined over a fifty year period.  The main characters are fully-rounded creations.  Chips is sly, Sid more than a little self-serving, Delilah suitably bewitching, the young Hiero hopelessly lost, unable to find his place in the world.  Personally I wouldn't have bothered with Armstrong, whose reality muddies the waters unnecessarily.  Whilst I am absolutely clear why Sid steals the recording I am utterly unclear as to why he commits the act of betrayal.  And ultimately the successful quest of the two octogenarians is let down by its object.  It's a bit like finding the truth behind the Wizard of Oz, only it's not funny, not dramatic and just very, very sad.

A book that could have been better, then.  But nonetheless a book every bit as good as its 2011 peers and one which everybody who cares about the contemporary novel should read.

Gathering the Water - Robert Edric

I was reminded strongly of William Golding - one man, isolated in extreme nature, utterly focused on a daunting task, in this case supervising the flooding of a Yorkshire valley to create a new reservoir to feed the demands of Victorian industry.  We really only have Weightman himself; the only other character of note, the slightly older widow Mary Latimer, with whom he is obsessed but not sexually, is and remains a bundle of secrets, and her sister Martha is genuinely insane.  The other locals resent Weightman, naturally, because he is drowning their world and driving them away.  At the end, only Weightman remains.

I continue to be impressed with Edric.  He is one of the few contemporary literary writers who has a distinct voice and subject matter.  I still don't understand why he isn't better known.  Apparently, Gathering the Water was longlisted for the 2006 Booker.

Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch

One of the sensational shortlist for the 2011 Booker Prize, which rather predictably went to Julian Barnes, this is historical fiction derived from two real events - the rescue of a little Wapping boy from the jaws of an escaped Bengal tiger by wild animal trader Charles Jamrach and the sinking of the whaler Essex.  To begin with, we are lulled into thinking it is a children's story in the manner of Leon Garfield, but it goes much, much darker as we read on.

The early chapters in and around mid-Victorian London's notorious Ratcliffe Highway are pure Garfield and entirely captivating.  Our hero, eight-year-old Jaffy Brown, is rescued from the tiger and given a job at Jamrach's.  There he meets Tim, and through Tim, Ishbel.  Soon Jaffy and Tim and Jamrach's supplier Dan Rymer are sent round the world on a rich client's whim in search of a living dragon.  They travel aboard the whaler Lysander.  Here, I have to admit, I got bored and was in danger of abandoning the read.  So much time is spent establishing the multitudinous crew members that for me it was a struggle to keep going - but Birch has to risk this because we need to feel for these people later.  I am so glad I kept going.

The scenes of whaling are gross but diverting.  They sail to the ends of the earth.  They find their dragon - a Komodo, I assume, though Birch is not explicit - and then everything goes horribly wrong.

The writing has a richness that's almost tactile.  The whole story is told by Jaffy who starts out an undeducated sewer rat of eight and during the course of the novel grows up in the hardest way imaginable.  How you 'voice' that radical a character development is critical - and Birch succeeds brilliantly.  Tremendous stuff, highly recommended.  I checked out Birch's other novels and have added her Scapegallows (2008) to my must-have list.

Morality Play - Barry Unsworth

Shameful though it is, it took Unsworth's recent death to remind me to check out his work.  I scanned through the list and this one leapt out at me.  It's medieval, which I like, and it's about drama, just like my PhD.  I acquired a copy, jumped in - and was immediately blown away with how well Unsworth writes.  He doesn't lay on the history research with the proverbial trowel, yet there are things here even I didn't know about.  Did medieval players really have a lexicon of hand gestures with which to express emotion?  I genuinely don't know but if they didn't they should have and it sounds absolutely convincing in this text.  It is also a murder mystery with a paedophile serial killer on the loose in County Durham.  But that's not what Morality Play is about.  Unsurprisingly, it's about morality and the moral code of the age, which is obviously different to ours.

Most of all, though, this is high literature, plainly but beautifully written with the editorial control of a true master.  It might only be 188 pages long but there is no way this novel is slight.