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are certainly those who feel her work is a rehabilitation of cromwell that he doesn t deserve however mantel is such a masterful writer clearly in control of her craft that i doubt she makes any significant errors her cultural references are effortlessly natural she portrays the times without ever appearing to insert detail just for effect others have remarked on one stylistic difficulty with mantel s writing her tendency to use an untethered he making the reading a bit difficult in places he is almost always cromwell himself which blends first person and third person nicely when it gives the reader intimate access to his thoughts and feelings but occasionally he is someone else in the very next sentence and that brings you up short in a passage requiring a pause to figure out who is speaking or being described mantel helps sometimes by saying he cromwell an effective if somewhat clumsy method of clarification overall it s not a major sticking point over hundreds of pages you get used to it weeks after finishing these novels i am still thinking about cromwell fortunately mantel plans to write another novel about the remainder of his life whether her sympathetic portrayal is accurate or not it s been a long time since i enjoyed the company of such an intelligent charming kind dangerous character meeting such a person in fiction is nothing but pleasurable although in real life i would run fast and far from cromwell i look forward to seeing him again on the page crossposted from hotchpot cafe where books are always on the menu but aren t the only fare excerpt from a meeting with thomas cranmer archbishop of canterbury at cromwell s home the door opens it is alice bringing in lights this is your daughter rather than explain his family he says this is my lovely alice this is not your job alice she bobs a small genuflection to a churchman no but rafe and the others want to know what you are talking about so long they are waiting to know if there will be a dispatch to the cardinal tonight jo is standing by with her needle and thread tell them i will write in my own hand and we will send it tomorrow jo may go to bed oh we are not going to bed we are running gregory s greyhounds up and down the hall and making a noise fit to wake the dead i can see why you don t want to break off yes it is excellent alice says we have the manners of scullery maids and no one will ever want to marry us if our aunt mercy had behaved like us when she was a girl she would have been knocked round the head till she bled from the ears then we live in happy times he says when she has gone and the door is closed behind her cranmer says the children are not whipped we try to teach them by example as erasmus suggests though we all like to race the dogs up and down and make a noise so we are not doing very well in that regard he does not know if he should smile he has gregory he has alice and johane and the child jo and in the corner of his eye at the periphery of his vision the little pale girl who spies on the boleyns he has hawks in his mews who move toward the sound of his voice what has this man i think of the king s advisers dr cranmer says the sort of men who are about him now and he has the cardinal if the cardinal still thinks well of him after all that has passed posted by j g at 2 16 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels 2009 wolf hall 2012 bring up the bodies j g tuesday december 2 2014 marie c reviews the narrow road to the deep north by richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north by richard flanagan published 2014 by knopf literary fiction this year s man booker prize winner is a tough tough read but a very rewarding one australian novelist richard flanagan tells the fictional story of dorrigo evans a doctor and survivor of the japanese pow camp that built the burma railway between bangkok and rangoon in 1943 the railway was built using forced and slave labor thousands of people died constructing it under unimaginable conditions the novel documents the experiences of dorrigo several ordinary soldiers on the line including darky gardiner a young man who tries to find the good in every day even when circumstances are at their bleakest and there always seems to be a new low flanagan gives us excruciating detail on the privations and suffering the men endured the starvation the long long miles of walking the arduous work done without proper tools the ever increasing demands of the soldiers directing the work and the brutal beatings and humiliations inflicted by the guards he also gives his characters startling humanity including the guards and taskmasters who regard suffering as a matter of course and the pows as less than human because they are prisoners alive and not dead the cruelties of the burma railway have been documented in other books and films the bridge over the river kwai pierre boulle s 1952 novel that became the famous david lean film being the most famous example but what the narrow road brings to mind for me is the more recent nonfiction unbroken laura hillenbrand s recounting of the louis zamperini story particularly his time as a pow in japan zamperini was not invovled in the burma railway but flanagan s story echoes some of the the same themes and particulars especially the pows living conditions hillenbrand s book also explains in historical terms why the united states ceased prosecuting japanese war criminals which i found very helpful in understanding those parts of flanagan s book in which the point of view shifts to the guards particularly their post war experiences because he does try to tell the story of the railway from their perspective too a choice i think is brave and challenging those passages were also hard to read the rationalizing of torture and cruelty and flanagan without justifying anything i think is trying to talk about how someone can be capable of violence and comfortable with it i think he s trying to talk about how a culture of violence perpetuates itself showing the whole life cycle of it from earliest humiliation to its effects far downstream on people on whom a hand was never laid in this book those people are the women in dorrigo s life particularly his wife ella and his many mistresses dorrigo marries ella out of social expectation he s deeply in love with his estranged uncle s young wife amy whom he believes has died while he was at war he spends the rest of his life trying to bury his grief and his post war trauma in affairs and in his public life in his post war life he becomes a kind of spokesman for the pows on the railway and becomes a very well known public figure at some point he has to reconcile all these parts of himself find a way to move forward there is a beautiful terrible poetry to the narrow road and i found the book very hard to put down i would read short passages at a time take breaks come back read more come back it s disturbing sometimes terrifying sometimes bleak and almost impossibly sad and yet i didn t want it to end flanagan has written a wonderful and difficult book that i would recommend to just about anyone a classic deserving of the recognition it s received rating buy ftc disclosure i did not receive this book for review posted by marie cloutier at 9 45 am 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels 2014 the narrow road to the deep north marie c wednesday july 23 2014 man booker 2014 long list announced the 13 novels long listed for the 2014 man booker prize were announced today and as always there were mixed reactions to the selection many of the uk newspapers like the daily telegraph reflected on the number of novels by american authors who wouldn t have been eligible until the rule change for this year s prize some commented also on the paucity of female authors three out of the 13 titles were there any surprises the inclusion of joy ann fowler best known for the best selling jane austen book club raised a few eyebrows as did david nicholls s listing none of the commentators said so specifically but reading between the lines the feeling was that these were rather light to be considered for a premier book prize inevitably there were comments on who had not been included many of the big names were missing in fact no dave eggers no ian mcewan no will self and no martin amis but of course the big surprise as the independent commented was the absence from the list of donna tartt s the goldfinch she had been considered a cert for the long list having won the pullitzer prize with the novel in april unless i was misreading the various articles i didn t detect a lot of enthusiasm for this year s listing no one actually said it was a dull list but i didn t see any great buzz either what people found disappointing was the shortage of representation by writers from commonwealth countries which we have grown to see as a key feature of the man booker prize in the past only one commonwealth writer actually made it to the list the narrow road to the deep north by the australian writer richard flanagan as rebecca jones the bbc arts correspondent commented there are no indian or african authors and that will raise eyebrows among those who feared writers from some commonwealth countries might get squeezed out by the new rules what do you think of the list care to take a bet on which will win eventually the longlist joshua ferris to rise again at a decent hour american richard flanagan the narrow road to the deep north australian karen joy fowler we are all completely beside ourselves american siri hustvedt the blazing world american howard jacobson j british paul kingsnorth the wake british david mitchell the bone clocks british neel mukherjee the lives of others british david nicholls us british joseph o neill the dog irish american richard powers orfeo american ali smith how to be both british niall williams history of the rain irish posted by karen at 5 32 pm 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels 2014 longlist sunday july 20 2014 the luminaries by eleanor catton 2013 winner when eleanor catton s the luminaries was declared the winner of the 2013 man booker prize almost every article and review drew attention to the fact it was the longest novel ever awarded the prize and catton the youngest ever winner much was made too of the genre affinity between catton s work and that master of the sensation novel wilkie collins most reviewers seemed to agree with the booker judges who called it extraordinary luminous vast the only dissenting voices came from the panel convened by one of the uk tv channels the night before the award who admired catton s technical virtuosity but didn t feel it was the best book of the year and david sexton in the london evening standard who argued that a stunning feat of construction didn t necessarily equate to a great book having now read this 832 page tome i find myself more in david sexton s camp than that of the booker judges that isn t to say i didn t enjoy the book i did catton really knows how to tell a good story but then she d have to be good at this in order to keep people engaged through such a lengthy book her plot is intricately crafted and she manages the multiple story lines deftly making you want to keep turning the page to find out what happens next in this tale of death deception and doomed love set in new zealand during the time of the gold rush the book opens on a stormy night as the young scottish lawyer walter moody lands on the shores of hokitika a town hurriedly constructed to service prospectors seeking to make their fortune in the surrounding hills and rivers shaken by an incident on the boat he goes into the first hotel he comes across badly in need of a restorative drink and a bed for the night he finds himself in a room of 12 men who slowly begin to reveal their unease about some strange recent events in the town involving a whore a dead hermit and a missing fortune together these 12 luminaries set about trying to get to the bottom of these events by piecing together the knowledge each of them holds although they are not constituted as a jury they do weigh up the evidence from each man s version of events and make judgements about some of the people involved catton made much of the fact that she structured her novel on astrological movements using a software programme to help her pinpoint the exact positioning of the stars corresponding with events in the book each chapter begins with an astrological chart indicating which characters are in ascendancy on the date in question i tried to follow this but couldn t see much beyond the fact the chart indicated which characters would be the focal point of the chapter it felt like an artifice that didn t add much to our understanding of the story initially the story is told in the form of a nested narrative where the 12 men tell their stories to moody in the hope he can make sense of their complex and multifaceted tales this moves to straight forward narration of specific events but then at the end catton loops right back to the beginning with some short chapters some just two or three paragraphs long which reveal the backstory and fill in the missing elements along the way we get plenty of melodramatic episodes with a shipwreck a murder trial and a seance all the elements are there for a darn good read and yet for all its technical prowess there was something missing from this book it was difficult at first to pin down what that missing element was but eventually it dawned on me that what i was lacking was any sense in which the novel illuminated the human condition outside the plot there wasn t much else of substance all was really smoke and mirrors and the characters just faded out rather than came more sharply into view the more we heard them speak there was little that caused me to pause and reflect in short there was little evidence of the emotional or philosophical weight that i expect from a booker prize winner and that s really my issue the luminaries is a really enjoyable well crafted novel and is one of the best of its kind i have read in many years but it s not up to the gold standard that the booker should represent how the judges chose this over jim crace s harvest is just baffling posted by karen at 2 47 pm 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels 2013 the luminaries saturday march 29 2014 unexploded by alison macleod 2013 longlist eight months after britain declares war on german the people of brighton anxiously prepare for a rumoured nazi invasion the town s piers are dismantled and barbed wire goes up on the beach soon vegetable seedlings will replace the flower displays in the parks and the lights of the fun fair will be dimmed already the racecourse has been transformed into an internment camp for whose people deemed to be suspicious such as otto gottlieb a german jewish a...