The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng - Booker Prize 2012, Man Asia Literary Prize 2013

I must admit, gardening is not really my thing, I do appreciate a beautiful garden and I have seen a number of Japanese gardens in my time, obviously without fully appreciating the abstract message being conveyed. This novel is a contemplative one, hence the week or so since I finished it before getting to this review. It was a slow read, only due to the fact that I was letting it slowly sink in, as I’m sure Tan Twan Eng intended.

Set in Malaya in the mountains we have our narrator Yun Ling Teoh returning to the gardens of the evening mist to relive her story of being apprenticed to Nakamura Aritomo, a former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Judge Teoh is a former war criminals prosecutor who had spent time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, where her sister perished. She despises the Japanese for those atrocities but at the same time her story of her relationship with Aritomo and her wish of building a garden for her sister’s memory is slowly drip fed to us. Her time working Aritomo’s garden (Yugiri) and her relationship with the gardener and the locals is revealed slowly through the mists of her recollections.

At each turn in the path, Aritomo drew my attention to an arrangement of rocks, an unusual sculpture, or a stone lantern. They looked as if they had been lying there on the beds of moss and ferns for centuries. ‘These objects signal to the traveller that he is entering another layer of his journey,’ he said. ‘They tell him to stop and gather his thoughts, to savour the view.’

And our story unfolds in this manner, long winding passages with detailed descriptions of leaves, or clouds and then the occasional blooming of Judge Teoh’s story, we as readers have entered another layer of our journey. Although you could simply follow the narrative plot here this is a multi layered novel one that slowly encompasses “the art of setting stones” and a miniature view of a much broader landscape. We do have tea ceremonies, Buddhist references, raked sand to represent various elements, holes in hedges to focus your attention and more. All sub plots to the main story by our  narrator, who is losing her memory but revealing her story to us at the same time. A story which contains local terrorists, tea growers, tribes who harvest bat nests (for soup), kamikaze pilots and a mystery of hidden Japanese war wealth.

Despite my fears of a CT attack, I enjoyed living on my own again, in these mountains where the breath of trees turned to mists, where the mists entered the clouds and fell to earth again as rain, where the rain was absorbed by the roots deep in the earth and drawn out as vapour again by the leaves a hundred feet above the ground. The days here opened from beyond one set of mountains and ended behind another, and I came to think of Yugiri as a place lodged somewhere in a crease between daybreak and sunset.

This is a beautifully styled novel and as I mentioned before one that I allowed to slowly sink into my conscience. Judge Teoh’s life and the journey through war camps, through varied relationships and her attachment to Japanese gardens as well as woodblock prints and tattoo was not a journey I could quickly skim through. Personally I could understand frustration at a number of reader’s hands and if Japanese gardens, meditation and slow awareness is not your think then this would probably infuriate you no end.

Overall a very enjoyable novel which taught me a great deal about Japanese gardening, post war Malaya as well as narrative style. A worthy inclusion to the Booker Shortlist and a serious competitor for the Man Asia Literary Prize – the shorlist being:

Musharraf Ali Farooqi – Between Clay and Dust

Hiromi Kawakami – The Briefcase

Orhan Pamuk – Silent House

Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists

Jeet Thayil – Narcopolis

One of which I have reviewed here and the others will be forthcoming (once I’ve received or read them).

Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil - Booker Prize 2012

To say it has been a mad couple of months would be an understatement, holidays, catching up on the work that piled up whilst I was on holidays, charity work, running and all whilst attempting to be a dad!!! Thank goodness I’ve had a great Booker Prize shortlist to transport me away from the day to day grind, pity I haven’t had time to update my blog. This will be a short review only.

I read this novel about a month ago so please forgive me if my recollections aren’t fresh and straight  onto the page.  This is Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s debut novel and even though it is primarily a novel about drug addiction, it is also a social reflection on the city once known as Bombay (the novel begins and ends with the work “Bombay”).

This novel opens with our mysterious narrator stating, “…and since I’m the one telling it (the story) and you don’t know who I am, let me say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now”, and moves throughout from first person to third person narrative across numerous characters. The eunuch prostitute and opium den worker Dimple, is the one who seems to appear most, but she is not the narrator. We also have den owner addict and family man Rumi, a celebrated artist who can’t control his addictions, an ageing Chinese refugee who laments on a place and time lost as well as our “narrator” recently returned from the USA.

The common bond being drugs, this is an hallucinatory story about loss of identity, motivations for addiction, peppered with dream like sequences, bold tales of the physical impacts of drugs containing graphic details of violence and sex. Through addiction, each character has lost more than their control of their lives, this is how the raw underbelly of a city existed in the 1970’s.

Only the rich can afford surprise and/or irony. The rich crave meaning. The first thing they ask when faced with eternity, and in fact the last thing, is: excuse me, what does this mean? The poor don’t ask questions, or they don’t ask irrelevant questions. They can’t afford to. All they can afford is laughter and ghosts. Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender. An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency?

There is also the melting pot of religion, race, gender, poverty vs wealth and more in this dark tale, that reflects the seemingly better capitalist world of the future (Mumbai) against the not too distant past, as well as giving voice to the victims of that time. Is the new future life of being clean what the poor and addicted want?

Unlike any other Indian novel I have read before this debut strikingly delves into the city of Bombay and the tales of opium, cocaine and heroin addiction are startlingly real, and I could understand why some readers have found the subject matter, the style (who’s voice is talking now?) and the bleak moral a bit too much to handle. Another realist novel on the 2012 shortlist, looks like we’re living in very very dark times indeed.

Umbrella - Will Self - Booker Prize 2012

Where to start? Where to start? At the beginning? An epigram by James Joyce, well that’s the start isn’t it? Gives it away? Probably the easiest part of the book to read. A journey – rugged, with traps and snares galore, across 90 years. NINETY TWO to be exact. Covering Dr Zack Busner’s work with mental patients. More specifically a mental patient called Audrey Death. Death, De’Ath (something like that I can’t remember and can’t find it – how could you when the novel is 397 – THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY SEVEN – pages, PAYYY JEZZZ, long and there are no chapters, only paragraphs that go for 26 pages at a time, well not all of them but more than most. Oops forgot linear structure, no problems this book doesn’t have any, only reason I know it goes for ninety two years is the précis inside the front cover, a nice brown one too, just like the quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog, no dogs in the war, or were there? Not sure, things can get frightfully muddled in the trenches, especially when your sister is working in an arsenal making the munitions – MOO NISCH ONS – that’s my sister Audrey. Gets encephalitis lethargica you know, that’s a sleeping sickness of the mind. What do you do with people who get that? Put them in a mental hospital of course, with others who have it too. Use an umbrella to keep the rain off, or as an insider’s term for the treatment.

Get the um-brella, Doctor! Get the umbrella! Which is a euphemism he knows to be widespread among the staff, and which he abhors. – Eeeerarrr’rrra’rrra -!

Had to put a quote in – always do – sometimes more than one, probably a good idea to put another one in, why not three short ones, gives the same idea

her brain…it’s outside of time…so far away…in another place… in another phase of development, Willis said when they all pitched up that morning.

told the psychiatrist he had experienced it as a continuous present, an awful and unchanging Now?

He knows – and understands also that using net curtains to guard against your privacy is as futile, surely, as employing tenses to divide time?

Did I mention we follow a Doctor? He treats these patients, tries to find a cure, manages to get a few of them awake, in retrospect of course, there’s no such thing as time in this novel, only give away are the lines from songs thown in every now and then. Sing along songs of WW1 days (World War One, the Great War, the war to end all wars, that one), pop tunes of the 70’s (who’s an ape-man? I’m an ape-man, I’m an ape ape man, I’m a ape-man….oops done it again, opening sentence given away) Italics would be useful, help you break up your thoughts – not that things would stay the same even mid senten

Chop and change, here we go ‘round the mulberry bush…the mulberry bush, could make sense and probably does if you have a repetitive mental illness where time has stood still. Especially working in a repetitive job, working a lathe, or making umbrellas (there they are again – what do they mean?). Have to red this again, can I do it? They’ll be reading this one for years, studying it in universities – YOU – KNEE – VERR – CITY – they will you know. Will win the prize, I’m confident of that, a standout book, one that’s the most challenging of reads, one that will infuriate about 92% of readers (that means 8% will read it right through– you know how it works 100% less the ninety two who didn’t finish it – hey there’s that NINETY TWO number again, could that mean anything?)

Will Self is credited with the following quotes – and as we know quotes from the web are always true -  "I don't write fiction for people to identify with and I don't write a picture of the world they can recognise. I write to astonish people.”,  "What excites me is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable."  He’s achieved that here – a heroic, challenging but ultimately very rewarding novel, just don’t expect it to be easy. For me the absolute standout of the year’s shortlist of the ones I’ve finished to date.

PS – Just in case there are one or two of the 92% out there, this review is a poorly written parody - PARRROOOOODEEEE

2012 Booker Prize Shortlist announcement

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)

Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)

Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)

Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

Charity Update

As you may know each and every month I name a charity, generally, but not exclusively, linked to literacy, and ALL monies raised through my affiliation with Book Depository will be donated to that charity. As I have mentioned before I will post the earnings on my blog at the end of a review each month - with a screen shot of my earnings for full transparency purposes.

Charities have been DryJuly and Asthma Foundation in July, Wall of Hands in August and Fire Foundation in September. The screen shot below shows the earnings with Wall of Hands not getting a donation, with the first two charities sharing US$33.04 and the last still clocking up purchases to add to the US$1.94 raised.

Swimming Home - Deborah Levy - Booker Prize 2012

Let’s hope that Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” is somewhat off the mark, as this year’s Booker Prize long list is a reflection of us living in depressing times. “The Lighthouse” and “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” both bleak tales of broken relationships, journeys into finding one’s self and now we have “Swimming Home” a bleak tale of depression, mental instability and…you guessed it….broken relationships.

You could look at Deborah Levy’s latest work on face value and report that it covers eight days, in 1994, in the lives of a pair of couples, one daughter, a psychiatric doctor, a resident housekeeper and the drop in Kitty Finch who is asked to stay.

We have Joe (or Jozef or JHJ) a famous poet, his wife Isabel a foreign correspondent and their daughter Nina. They are holidaying in France (near Nice), is it an attempt to rekindle their doomed marriage? A mother who was always away and missed her daughter growing up? Their companions are Mitchell and Laura, two family friends who are sharing the villa with them for the summer, they are on the verge of bankruptcy, shop owners and gluttons, also questioning their marriage. Arriving as a naked floating “bear” in the bottom of their swimming pool is Kitty, a self-proclaimed botanist who has stopped her anti-depressant medication. As a regular visitor to the villa, Kitty is adored by the live in housekeeper/groundsman Jurgen and despised by another long term resident, retired “shrink” Madeleine. This is a perfect setting for love triangles, explorations of love and worth and family tensions.

The spare room was dark and hot because the windows were closed and the curtains drawn. A pair of grubby flip-flops lay on top of the tangle of drying weeds lying on the floor. Kitty’s red hair streamed over a lumpy stained pillow, her freckled arms wrapped around Nina, who was clutching the nylon fur rabbit that was her last embarrassed link with childhood. Isabel knew Nina was awake and that she was pretending to be asleep under what seemed to be a starched white tablecloth. It looked like a shroud.

But it is the depression edge and the unsettling sparse prose and the underlying tension (will Kitty do something disturbing?) that is the real stand out here. Without giving  you any spoilers I did spend quite some time wondering if Kitty would act in some demented manner, but at the same time thinking that such actions would only belittle the real issue of mental illness, but on the other side of the coin, if it was to portray mental illness truly then maybe something will occur. This is all drawn out in Deborah Levy’s stark but poignant prose.

To have been so intimate with Kitty Finch had been a pleasure, a pain, a shock, an experiment, but most of all it had been a mistake. He asked her again to please, please, please drive him safely home to his wife and daughter.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.’

Although it may appear so, that’s quote is not a spoiler as it is on the second page of the book.

This is a novel which does for depression what Jon McGregor’s “Even The Dogs” (winner of the 2012 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize) did for heroin addiction, and in my mind that is very high praise. This is a short book which demands to be reread and very much a worthy inclusion on the Booker Prize list. I should also point out the publisher of this novel “And Other Stories” who produce four books per year purely on subscription. Through “patrons” paying 35 pounds for all four books they can publish in line with their values and approach booksellers as their product is already being read. In my mind a great business model and one that should be supported (I will be doing so!!). For more details visit their site at www.andotherstories.org

I must congratulate this year’s judges, because on face value I did think it would be a difficult list to tackle, but I’m part way onto my fifth novel from the long list and am enjoying the whole experience. At this stage it appears to be a great year for fiction, even if I don’t judge” Philida” as highly as the others. Next up will be a review of “The Teleportation Accident” by Ned Beauman but I’ll do a post tomorrow once the shortlist is announced together with an update on the amounts I’ve donated to charity as a result of my links to the Book Depository.

The Lighthouse - Alison Moore - Booker Prize 2012

Back in 1985 Patrick Suskind came up with the best selling novel “Perfume” (Das Parfum) which attempted to explore the relationship between the sense of smell and the emotional attachments that those experinces may hold. This was made into a film by one of my favourite directors Tom Tykwer in 2006. I distinctly recall both art forms and the problem they had attempting to create an experience based on an olfactory response in the written word or on film, both being primarily sight driven.

Zoom forward to 2012 and we suddenly have an amazing first novel by Alison Moore which not only attempts to replicate the sense of smell but also covers the spectrum of balance, spatial awareness, light, dark, sound, taste and touch all pieced together in a bleak setting of failed relationships.

Our main protagonist is Futh, a middle aged and recently separated man, who is on a journey to Germany for a walking holiday. His recollections of his parents failed marriage kick in on page one and his revisitations of his childhood continue throughout this short novel.

Written in sparse dark prose, we actually feel our way through Futh’s darkness as he recalls the same haunting moments from his youth and his failed marriage over and over again. Each time, the darkness is broken by a new revelation (the lighthouse piercing the darkness) and slowly but surely a more holistic picture is formed. But are we fully aware of the danger ahead?

In the night, there will be a storm. It will be brief, if a little violent, and hardly anyone will even realise it has occurred, although they might hear it raging, thundering, in their dreams.

In the morning, by the time people are up and about, the sun will be out again, and the rain-soaked pavements will be dry, and there will be very little evidence of damage.

Short, sharp chapters with titles such as “violets’, “coffee, “beef and onion”, “perfume” and more each give us a snippet of Futh’s life or the life of Esther, the wife of the owner of the first hotel Futh visits in Hellhaus (German for bright house or light house).

He talked about flash patterns. ‘The light,’ he said, gazing fixedly at the hazy horizon, ‘flashed every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’ And Futh, looking at the lighthouse, wondered how this could happen – how there could be this constant warning of danger, the taking of all these precautions, and yet still there was all this wreckage.

This is a novel which addresses loneliness, fate, doomed relationships, isolation and a whole lot more of those remote, bleak, depressive and dark emotions and all in a setting of constant “lighthouse” reminders (Futh carries a silver lighthouse vial that used to contain perfume). Add in the clever attempt at presenting all the senses (hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste) throughout and we have a very bold and memorable first novel. If you are not entranced by the tight but accurate descriptions of stilettos on hardwood floors, or camphor as mothballs or sunburn and hot baths then this novel may not be to your liking.

Even though we almost know our main character's fate before we start page one (is Murial Spark's intro quote that much of a giveaway?) we cannot help but to be drawn closer and closer to the ending, as a moth to a lamp or a fly to a venus fly trap. 

My first novel from the 2012 long list was “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” another tale of a failed relationship and a walking journey (also with inadequate footwear) but really that is where the comparisons end. Both novels I’m glad to have had the privilege of reading and to think I was approaching 2012’s long list with such trepidation!