Demob Happy

John Boyne – The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas I’m naturally suspicious of the recent glut of novels marketed as children’s literature for adults (see ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ and ‘The Life of Pi’), but this is a darker proposition. The Holocaust makes for a particularly poignant subject for John [...]

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Book Review: Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road The Richard Yates back-story has passed into popular literary legend: the acclaimed author who never sold more than 12,000 copies per hardback, and whose works were largely out of print before being rediscovered posthumously and enjoying a revival. For a Yates novice such as myself this might seem [...]

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Book Review: Independence Day – Richard Ford I’ve just completed Richard Ford’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Independence Day’, and I have to admit it left me a bit cold. The novel forms the middle part of a trilogy of large-ish books (beginning with ‘The Sportswriter’ and ending with ‘The Lay of the Land’) narrated by a notionally [...]

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The fantastic Mr Fox As probably Paul Theroux’s best-known fiction work I’ve long wanted to read ‘Mosquito Coast’, and not just because I am a fan of his grumpy brand of travel writing. A 1980s feature film adaptation – starring Harrison Ford and River Phoenix – left a indelible mark on me, perhaps because, as [...]

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Dignity and denial – the noble art of butlering In a comment on my post reviewing ‘When we Were Orphans‘, John Self of Asylum pointed out that many of Ishiguro’s novels are about ‘blindness’. While that novel has not warmed on me, it was with ‘blindness’ in mind that I read ‘Remains of the Day’, [...]

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Chance – the musical ! 9/10 I’m having a sudden urge to raid Paul Auster’s works, following up ‘Mr. Vertigo‘ with ‘The Music of Chance‘, a book I had long-neglected but somehow – like an Auster character, perhaps – convinced myself I had already read. This is probably because of the low-key but cultish film [...]

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Scaling the dizzy heights ? 8/10 It’s impossible to write about Paul Auster’s ‘Mr Vertigo‘ and completely avoid the dreaded term ‘Magic Realism’ – even if it’s a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named [...]

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Carry the fire 9/10 I was initially surprised to hear that ‘The Road‘, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and [...]

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Season of bad will 7/10 I borrowed ‘A Season In The West’ on the recommendation of my mother-in-law [insert predictable joke here], who suggested I might find in it interesting parallels with Rose Tremain’s ‘The Road Home‘ which deals with similar themes. Both books concentrate on the migrant experience of London life, ‘The Road Home’ [...]

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Apocalypse redux! 8.5/10 Following on from my post about John Updike’s seminal ‘Rabbit, Run‘, ‘Rabbit Redux‘ is the second in Updike’s quartet of novels chronicling the life and times of America as seen through the eyes of everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Written – as with the other three – at the tale end of one [...]

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