Author: Graham

The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is not the first Daphne du Maurier novel you are likely to read. After all, she is much better known for her pacy, plot-driven psychological stories like Rebecca, The Scapegoat or Jamaica Inn.

The Glass-Blowers has little of that. In fact, at the beginning, I found it a little off-putting, because it didn’t quite rise to my expectations. The narrative device, of an opening third person narration, followed by a long first-person letter narration, and a closing third person narration, makes it hard to climb into the action in a way you might expect from a du Maurier.

But here is an excellent example of why readers should apply the 50 page rule before giving up on any book (save perhaps the most obvious trash): This book begins as an unformed lump, at first it’s hard to imagine it could be anything of value. But as du Maurier slowly and methodically breathes life into it, the story takes shape over the course of the French Revolution. It is masterfully crafted, with the contours of each character etched in crystal clarity upon an impeccably told history of the rise of the First Republic, the Reign of Terror and the ascension to power of Emperor Bonaparte.

Like the glass that acts as metaphor throughout, there is both strength and fragility in the Busson family, and especially the narrator and central character Sophie. In fact, The Glass-Blowers is nothing short of an epic; yet it is one that respects the personality of the straightforward and efficient Sophie herself, by managing to fit onto a mere 300 pages. In this, du Maurier shows respect also for the reader; something we know and appreciate from her more celebrated works.

Lovers of A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables take note: Dickens and Hugo do not have a duopoly on the market for great 1789 fiction.





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The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a little gem of a book – easily the best I have read so far this year.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is not easy to review, because the book itself refuses to adhere to conventions. In fact, it is only by having read and reflecting on this book that you are reminded how conventional much of today’s literature has become.

To say that it is a series of anecdotes about a grandmother and a granddaughter on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland is factually accurate, but does the book no justice at all. There is a story thread that runs through the book, hidden in plain sight.

To say that Jansson uses commonplace events as metaphors to illuminate deeper truths, and in so doing makes the commonplace extraordinary, is too simplistic. Jansson seems to skirt the line between metaphor and on-the-nose narration.

Her prose is sparse, and while this may reflect the work of the translator, it is somehow perfectly suited to the story and the characters.

The willful and sensitive granddaughter, Sophie, does not exactly grow up, but in the spaces between the chapter-anecdotes, which read almost nostalgically, we see the structure of the grown woman Sophie will one day become – this vision lends depth to the anecdotes and gives the reader important perspective.

And in the spaces between the grandmother’s many naps and clandestine cigarette breaks, we see that same woman: an unwritten character whose invisible womanhood binds the granddaughter and grandmother to each other, giving this short novella the breadth of a multigenerational epic.

No plot spoilers, but the final chapter made me cry. I’m not even sure if it was the subtle metaphor I imagined she was employing, or simply Jansson’s plain, beautiful writing onto which my mind projected a metaphor. And in the end, is there any difference?

Because either way, if I remain a writer and live as long as the grandmother, I would count myself lucky to ever write something as simple, as perfect and as honest as The Summer Book.



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Berlin Game by Len Deighton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first arrived in Berlin in 1991, having hitchhiked through East Germany in a series of old Trabants and the odd Mercedes. It was the day the telephone company was ripping out all the old GDR public phones and replacing them with Wessie ones, and as I crossed from the lights and noise of West Berlin into East Berlin, I realised I was going to have a hard time making a phone call. In the following years, I would work (and even have one notable flirtation) with East Germans as they struggled to adjust to life in a West that had swallowed their country.

So when I picked up Len Deighton’s Berlin Game, I hoped to revisit a little bit of that intangible sense of Cold War Germany – the clash of cultures and the deeper German culture that lay underneath; the fear and hatred of the Stasi; the casual bigotry of the Wessies against the Ossies; the dull tastelessness of Communism braced against the glitzy degeneracy of Capitalism.

To his credit, Deighton tries hard to fill the book with enough details to create that mood. But that is just the problem: he tries too hard. The details are too studied to feel credible. It contrasts well with the movie Goodbye Lenin, a beautiful and compelling sketch of East Germanness that draws from the artists’ resevoir of details with the natural ease of true natives.

The other major problem is with the book’s protagonist – whose name I have (tellingly) already forgotten two weeks after reading. Who is this man? Is he the pensive, understated and soft-spoken antihero the dialogue suggests? Or is he the scary hard man, prone to outbursts of violence, whom the narrator goes to great pains to describe? After reading the book, I still cannot really say and I’m sure Deighton had no real idea.

This points to a wider weakness in Deighton’s writing. His highly stylistic descriptions are used as a sticking plaster to cover over the shallowness of his characters. I paraphrase a sample here: “She flashed him the kind of smile that said she wanted to know more about his past, but was slightly afraid to ask the question.” There are dozens of these kinds of ‘smiles’ peppered throughout the text, and I’m sure if Deighton sat down with a police sketch artist he would be unable to create a drawing of a single one of them.

Of course, the book is ultimately a spy novel, and therefore should be judged by its compelling, racy plot. But here I have to give it only middling marks. In fact, very little happens, and although the ending is somewhat surprising, it achieves this ‘twist effect’ only by sacrificing the gritty realism that kept the action credible but slow the rest of the way through.

Ultimately the most interesting thing about Berlin Game has nothing to do with spies and little to do with the Cold War. It is what the story tells us about the very English author and his own country. Deighton, son of a working class man, struggled to find a place in a Britain that had faded from power. He wrote the book at the dawn of Thatcherism, at a time when his country had been humiliated by an IMF economic programme, shocked by race relations and bruised by the paramilitary consequences of Britain’s occupation of Northern Ireland.

The result is a well-wrought tale of bureaucratic London, pervaded by wry cynicism and divisions of social class, all washed down by copious glasses of neat gin. The details are sparse, but authentic. In this, we see that Deighton is truly writing what he knew.



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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There are some rules to good writing that, if followed, tend to improve the reader’s experience and make the text seem more professional. Here are four examples that are often given to would-be writers in creative writing courses: (1) avoid adverbs, (2) avoid arbitrary changes to character point-of-view, (3) show-don’t-tell, (4) keep the ‘voice’ consistent.
Of course, rules are made to be broken. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer isn’t just good writing, it’s great writing. And yet, it breaks all of these rules, liberally and willfully. Twain’s literary dance is freestyle, the joyous rhythm of pure storytelling, which casts his narrator’s gaze across an expanse of adverbs, ‘author-splaining’ and character points-of-view as wide as the Mississippi River; all in a literary voice that changes – practically mid-sentence – from the Southern soprano of a Missouri boy to the often ironic tenor of a Yankee intellectual.
Never do you get the sense that Twain takes these literary liberties out of amateurish necessity, as cover for having been a bad student in dance class. He shows you just enough flashes of clever convention to assure you he could, if he wanted, write the whole thing in the elegant ballroom waltz of his (very English and much admired) literary predecessors: Dickens and Thackery.
But Twain’s ambition is not just to tell great stories; it is to tell great American stories. This Americanness, fresh and unburdened by convention, makes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer such an interesting read. The style is raw, because it must be raw, if it is to tell of a country still in its adolescence.
So too the eponymous central character. Tom is a flawed hero, a shabby scholar, and an undisciplined and ofttimes ungrateful nephew to his long-suffering Aunt Polly. His boyish play at piracy or robbery makes no moral distinction between good and evil, and in that, he displays not badness, but the amorality of those who have not yet tasted forbidden fruit. Equally, though, he is bursting with vital energy, courage and shows us throughout the book’s pages glimpses of the American Smooth of goodness, which his manly future self will one day master.
Most of all, Sawyer is free. Free to fight with or befriend other boys, to smoke, to break out of his house at midnight and explore distant river islands, unconventional ideas or “h’anted houses”. He is the Lord of the Dance.
In all of these ways, Tom Sawyer is not a character at all. He is the personification of this juvenile America. His Adventures, set purposefully at the dawn of the civil war, are an allegory for the rise of the United States as it shuffles forward in an awkward, uncharted yet somehow inevitable dance towards greatness.
No wonder this book has entranced generations of American readers. When they read Tom Sawyer’s Adventures, they are not just being told a story, they are being told their own nation’s biography.
Tom’s flaws are their flaws; Tom’s accomplishments are theirs too. And while this ‘Nation-State Tom’ has long since grown up, and the Republic of his manhood long since turned into an Empire frail with decay, still there remains something of that unconquerable American spirit that makes this book important.
As the rock band Rush sang of Tom Sawyer, a 105 years later:
“What you say about his company, is what you say about society.”



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