Parenthood. Discuss.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

By Lionel Shriver

An outstanding novel powered by what so few novels manage to achieve: authenticity. Kevin’s detractors complain that they find it impossible to believe how a mother could feel so coldly towards her son, as does Eva in this novel. But I enjoyed the book precisely because I found that so believable.

It is perfectly reasonable that most mothers love their progeny (although I would argue that few love them unconditionally, which is almost always a tautology). But within the complexity of human nature and experience, let’s face it: there will be some parents who dislike their kids, who hate them, whose paternal relationship lacks love from both sides, and who feel distraught that their crime is among society’s unmentionables. Anyone who argues that it is unnatural for a mother not to love her son misunderstands nature, which is messy and experimental and never, ever immutable.

So I found Eva to be not just believable and authentic but utterly captivating for the way she represents a phenomenon (no matter how small) that must be true but is also vilified to the point of being ignored. This is the central reason why Kevin works so brilliantly. It is truly fresh and wonderful.

But there are a great many other things right with this book. The prose is lucid and witty. The plot is tightly controlled and delicately threaded – winning the effect of gripping the reader. I was lucky enough to read the novel while on a break; if I was supposed to be working, I would have had to fudge the time sheet.

Kevin is a stunning novel with a shocking dénouement. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Hairy, natch

Greybeard

By Brian Aldiss

Some writers build complex worlds and populate them with countless philosophies and cultures. That is the Tolkien school of storytelling. Other writers take a single, original idea and tell a straightforward story that hints at the big ideas someone like Tolkien would focus on. As a proper sci-fi writer, Aldiss is one of the latter kind. Greybeard is an exemplar of Aldiss’s school of thought: a lean, controlled, character-driven story with an easy idea at its heart.

The outstanding book about Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

Some books contain knowledge, others thrills. Skloot has managed to fill her book with both. The story of Henrietta Lacks was on the edge of history until Skloot took up the challenge of dragging it back to the centre. Lacks would have been all but forgotten had it not been for the investigative skills of this impressive young journalist. And yet the great impact Lacks has made on modern science continues to reverberate today. How could she have been forgotten? Well, lots of reasons (as Skloot outlines), but perhaps the most sensible explanation is that she herself did not do anything directly. It was cells from her cervix that enabled the acceleration of research 10 times faster than would have been possible without her.

How to write an excellent feminist book

How To Be A Woman

By Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran keeps it real – that’s a trite phrase these days, but I can’t think of more apt praise for Moran’s writing. Having never read any of her columns or articles, I went into this book cold, albeit receptive to what its marketers described as an irreverent take on feminism. For once, the marketers were right. Eschewing academic discourse and sociological analysis, Moran has nevertheless managed to write a book that penetrates and subverts patriarchy.

Her style is personal and direct. Many would describe her as shouty or ranty. Indeed, several female friends of mine have criticised Moran’s approach for these reasons. But I don’t have such a problem. On the contrary, I think that in 2011, Moran’s style works really well – maybe I say this because I generally agree with her, or maybe because I think she retains her reason despite being so personal about things. The fact is that however shouty she may be, she always brings her argument back to biscuits or Time Team. She has the passion one needs to challenge patriarchy, but the humility and good humour to not be a dick about it. She’s Richard Dawkins in a Teletubby suit. How much more persuasive would his arguments against God be if he didn’t sound like such a spoilt git? If he didn’t take himself so seriously? I think it’s brilliant – a major achievement – that Moran doesn’t have to take herself so seriously as a feminist in 2011. The movement must march onward with as much vigour as yesterday, but Moran shows that today it’s possible to march with a spring in your step.

But the fact that a number of female friends have rejected Moran’s style worries me. And it makes me wonder whether there is such a thing as female feminist writing for men. I know that Moran wins praise from many women, too, but if writing could be gendered, could her writing be more at the male of the spectrum? I wouldn’t use crude or sexist tools for locating it on that spectrum (it’s not just about how many times she mentions sex and booze versus handbags and shoes). I just wonder whether male feminists might be more open to Moran’s style than that of other writers?

I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that this book is all polemic. It is also a memoir, a supremely funny comedy and an astute insight into society in Britain. It is not at all stuffy; that is not to say it is not heavy; it is accessible and relatable. For that, Moran deserves great praise.

Wonder words

Wonder Boys

By Michael Chabon

Loving a book and then watching the film adaptation is like setting yourself up for a fall, isn’t it? So why not do it the other way round? I love Curtis Hanson’s movie Wonder Boys, and have done since the first time I saw it years ago. I sprung it on a group of friends, all of whom hated it. But I didn’t give up, and have watched it once a year or so ever since.

I always knew I wanted to read the novel on which it is based. Wonder Boys is, after all, a story about novels, writers and stories. Delving only deeper into this narrative, in the way it was originally conceived could only be a good thing. And indeed it is. Michael Chabon’s excellent novel is a sort-of literary screwball comedy. Where American Pie is dumb and dirty, Wonder Boys is dumb and dirty, but with a kind of grace. Chabon manages to drive forward his lumbering plot with pace and wit – and plenty of teasing. The story follows a creative writing professor and novelist, dreading the visit of his editor because his new novel simply isn’t ready. In fact, it’s sprawled into a 2,000-page mess. The editor arrives on the weekend of a literary festival, during which our hero becomes embroiled in all sorts of mischief along with his editor, two students, his in-laws, his lover and her husband.

The novel is perfectly conceived: taking place over one hectic weekend, it is exciting; that the weekend in question is when many things fall into and out of place for our hero is the real treat. We see a man demolished, systematically, by others but mostly by himself. We love him throughout and certainly, as he realises his folly and slips into emotional humility, at the end. This is a perfect novel.

Smokin’

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

In planning this pessimistic view of the future, Bradbury stripped back all the politics that could have bogged him down and focused only on their effects. The story follows a fireman’s revolt against his role of book burner, in a society where books are banned and proper discussion avoided. And it is these strange, but altogether believable, societal characteristics on which Bradbury focuses. That’s the beauty of this fascinating little novel.

Compared to 1984 and Brave New World, there are no proper politics in this book – and what a virtue! There are no fascists (really), no tyrants, no Big Brother, no Ministry of Truth. There are just the workers charged with enforcing these bizarre laws and a few members of the public, some of whom dissent and some of whom cannot step outside of the hegemony. I can only imagine Bradbury’s temptation to go into detail about how and why this society came to be this way, or about the power at play and the individuals in charge. But he avoids them all, and it is the secret of this novel’s success. The fact that tyrants have appeared, won and lost over and over again means that there’s little point in Bradbury inventing new ones for his dystopian vision. We know enough about past horrors to be perfectly able to fill in the gaps in Fahrenheit 451 and guess enough about the forms of politics. So they’re not necessary.

Instead, Bradbury rightfully centres his novel on one man, caught up in this awful hegemony, his role within it and the existence of his own freewill. The novel is 172 pages long; no more are necessary. In that short time, Bradbury takes us on an exciting journey – and one I’ll never forget.

So real you can smell the blood

In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote

In Cold Blood is an extraordinary book. Friends of literature know its claim to fame – journalism with a novelist’s approach – but the experience of reading it is much more profound than a simple tagline. In bringing together the two worlds of reportage and fiction, Capote is clearly a talented interviewer, researcher and writer. Most of us are blessed if we can succeed in just one of those roles.

The book tells the story of how two young men robbed and murdered a family in a small American town in 1959. In my opinion, Capote’s account is so compelling for focusing on two areas: the shockwaves sent through the community by this awful event, and the psychological profiles of the two killers. Let’s take the first focus. The voices of the community are one of the most memorable aspects of this book, whether it’s the hard line taken by the postmistress or the devastation of the victims’ friends. You can hear these characters as real people. Indeed they are so well drawn that you hit a paradox: they are as well characterised as a novel’s protagonists, which the writer has invented and spent time bending to his will – and yet these are flesh-and-blood people who did indeed live through the nightmare that struck this small community. Capote, then, has a talent for conducting a great interview and then capturing it within his text.

Now let’s turn to his portrayal of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote’s masterstroke is his decision not to reveal their motive early on. By doing so, he creates tension and chills. The killers are characterised so perfectly that you feel what they feel, even to the extent of being able to understand how they could come to commit such an awful crime. Capote delves into their respective histories and uses them to craft a chilling portrayal of the pair of them. Their statements – reproduced at length towards the end of the book – are compelling. It’s like reading a detective’s files. In fact, it’s better: it’s like interviewing murder suspects yourself and hearing their ghastly admissions.

One criticism of the book is that Capote fails to convey the killers’ long wait to execution. His attempt includes telling the stories of a few other death-row inmates, but this detracts from the tight story he has told until that point. I can understand why he might want to stretch out the close, as it happened in real life, but he doesn’t quite achieve what I suspect he wanted to. But that is a minor blot on an exquisite canvas. I suspect that In Cold Blood will remain an important book for some time.

The writer Philip and the theologian Phil

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

By Philip Pullman

Pullman’s book is the kind of literary dynamite that you find hard to believe did not exist previously. The idea is simple: re-tell the Jesus story by splitting the protagonist into two in order to show how the life of an honest and moral man become the story of a politician. Ingenious, isn’t it? How come it took over 2,000 years for someone to write this version?

Of course, Pullman shouldn’t be concerned with that question. He’s clearly spent his time focused on Biblical text and, more crucially, his plans of how to transform them into a spellbinding book. It is not academic, it is not fantasy that denies god, and it is certainly not Dawkins. Nevertheless, it is an economical and gentle unpicking of religion. Pullman shows very plausibly how the Jesus story could have become so famous and so influential. That is Pullman’s agenda here. He does not want to disprove religionists; he simply wants to propose the means of production of their greatest story.

There are countless history books whose authors have delved into caves in Palestine and poured over ancient scrolls to clean up the ambiguities left by the various accounts that make up the Bible. I have no doubt that many provide convincing arguments. Clearly, none are as convincing as the Bible, which continues to wield much more power than the occasional archaeology report. The fact that ambiguities remain passes most Christians by. It’s simply too convenient for many Christians to take the New Testament as reportage. But, any sensible person must acknowledge that it was subject to influence and revision over many years by many individuals. It is this flawed and dangerous aspect that Pullman explores here.

I don’t expect many Christians to abandon god as a result of having read this book. I don’t even expect any Christian to like it. But I would expect (as I hope this was Pullman’s humble aim) that, if they read this, they at least acknowledge the question marks hanging over the Jesus story. After all, any rational person would recognise the fluid nature of every other story from history: why not this one?

Pullman’s book is a gift, not just to atheists, but to storytellers and readers. And, in its own small way, it’s a daring dismantling of the greatest story ever told.

Everything and everyone, explained

Guns, Germs and Steel

By Jared Diamond

Most people have wondered at one time or another why history unfolded so differently in different parts of the world. Why did the Europeans conquer the Native Americans, and not the other way around? Why did some people develop paler skin than our forebears, and others darker? Why do some people live in skyscrapers, and others still in mud huts? For most of us, these questions remain in the pub or around a dinner table. We develop them no further; they are simply too big.

Diamond is the kind of insatiable scientist who devotes his time and energy to these sorts of questions. He’s also smart enough to know that most of us are interested in them, but are short on time and expertise. And so he has written what has to be described as one of the most comprehensive and compelling books on human history ever. I haven’t read many others, but the sheer number of surprises I found when reading Diamond’s is enough for me to believe that no other book like this exists. In tracing how the environment, geology, climate and biology caused the development of human life to unfold the way it has, Guns, Germs and Steel is an astonishing piece of work. To top it off, Diamond is a thrilling writer.

The book could not have been written by anyone else. Others could have tackled its central questions, but their responses would have been different. That’s because Diamond is canny: he knows that his readers need a personal guide through this long and arduous journey. So he brings together his experiences as an ecologist in New Guinea with his travels in Australia and Africa, and his upbringing as an American. Fascinatingly implicit in his approach to the question of how history unfolded differently on different continents is that he is an American with a top-class education and the resources necessary to write such a wonderful book – resources that include computers, literacy, food supplied by others, security, etc. It is to this depth that Diamond traces human history. The reader is surprised to hear that Africa’s poverty relative to Europe’s propensity of food is down to the fact that Africa started with fewer domesticable plant species than Europe thousands of years ago. It sounds obvious (indeed, it is!) but it’s the kind of problem that was compounded by other factors: eg, Eurasia’s west-east axis with no geological or environmental barriers in the middle promoted better migration and sharing than we see in Africa, whose north-south axis hinders cross-continent migration thanks to the different climates it spans and the existence across one great swathe of a huge desert.

These are but tiny, and no doubt ill-expressed, insights into Diamond’s view of history. Although he has condensed eons into a mere 425 pages, it is a comprehensive and lucid piece of work. Astonishing.

Carry on storytelling

The Things They Carried

By Tim O’Brien

When I recently told a friend the title of the book I was reading, he said, “That sounds like something a creative writing class would study.” He’s right – this book is on writing and literature class syllabuses around the world. I came across one of the stories years ago in such a class. And while I am usually resistant to ‘poster books’ held up by writing tutors as examples to follow (because that’s largely missing the point of creative writing), my rule does not apply to The Things They Carried.

In fact, hardly any rules apply to this outstanding piece of work. It is fiction, memoir, history and reportage all at the same time. I cannot imagine a more effective way of describing a soldier’s journey through the Vietnam war and its impact on his life. O’Brien’s achievement is in realising that any story about war is exactly that – a story, with artifice and design laced through it by the nature of telling. And so he writes self-reflexively about war storytelling, both among friends and in books.

His descriptions of the battle zone and combat itself are succinct and frank. There is not a spare word anywhere. To use a cliché, he really tells it like it is. O’Brien’s characters are clear distinctive and, of course, authentic – even the ones he made up. But perhaps the most moving aspect of this book is the contrast between the war zone and the outside world, both before and after. O’Brien describes his youth and his comrade’s post-war depression in what has to be the most effective way I could ever think of. The tale of his friend’s life after the war is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read.