Tickling the English

Title: Tickling the English

Author: Dara O’Briain

Number of pages: 310

Started: 7 March 2012

Finished: 12 March 2012

Opening words:

It was about one in the morning. I was in the passenger seat of a rented car on the M4. The car was being driven by a man called Damon. We were heading back to London after I’d done a gig at a theatre called the Playhouse in Weston-super-Mare.

The night had been a huge success, thanks mainly to the audience, who were chatty and interactive. In particular, there was a man called Chris who had an answer for everything. He told us how his appendix ‘went away’. He told us about the game he plays with his step-son where he lays a hammock on the ground and attaches one end of it to his car, the other to a tree. Then he accelerates away, tautening up the hammock and firing his step-son into the air.

Read a longer extract here.


Plot summary:

Nostalgia, identity, eccentricity, gin drinking and occasional violence... these are just some of the themes that stand-up comedian Dara O’Briain explores in Tickling the English.

O’Briain moved to England many years ago, but when he takes his show on tour around the country - from deserted seaside towns and remote off-shore islands, to sprawling industrial cities and sleepy suburbs - it's clear to him that his adopted home is still a bit of an enigma.

Why do the English pretend to be unhappy all the time?

Why can't they accept they rank about 5th, in everything?

And what's with all the fudge?

But this Irishman loves a challenge; he's certainly got the gregarious personality and the sure-fire wit to bring down the barriers of that famous English reserve, and have a good old rummage inside. Swapping anecdotes with his audiences and spending time wandering in their hometowns, this nosy neighbour holds England up to the light while exploring some of the attitudes he brought over here with him too.

As Dara goes door-to-door in search of England in this part tour diary, part travelogue, the result is an affectionate, hilarious and often eye-opening journey through the Sceptred Isle.

What I thought:

I like Dara O’Briain and am in fact going to see him at the Hammersmith Apollo later in the year. This book gave his observations about the English picked up from touring around the country (and to Ireland). The book was amusing, although not generally laugh out loud funny. I liked his observations about the English, although I suspect if I was of a difficult political persuasion, I might not have been quite so enamoured with what he said. I think there is a lot of truth in what he said about how we will always find the negative in even the best of news – and this reminded me why I often don’t bother to read newspapers.

It was a decent enough read, but Dara O’Briain on the stage is more amusing than on paper.

City of Bohane

Title: City of Bohane

Author: Kevin Barry

Number of pages: 277

Started: 16 November 2011

Finished: 21 November 2011

Opening words:

Whatever’s wrong with us is coming in off that river. No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river. This is the Bohane river we’re talking about. A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin’ wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane.

He walked the docks and breathed in the sweet badness of the river. It was past midnight on the Bohane front. There was an evenness to his footfall, a slow calm rhythm of leather on stone, and the dockside lamps burned in the night-time a green haze, the light of a sad dream. The water’s roar for Hartnett was as the rushing of his own blood and as he passed the merchant yards the guard dogs strung out a sequence of howls all along the front. See the dogs: their hackles heaped, their yellow eyes livid. We could tell he was coming by the howling of the dogs.



Plot summary:

Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and on the eerie bogs of Big Nothin’ that the city really lives. For years, the city has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there’s trouble in the air: they say his old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchman are getting ambitious; and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight... And then there's his mother.

What I thought:

I was not a fan of this book at all. I didn’t like the writing style, I didn’t enjoy the plot. I read it all because it is on the Costa Awards shortlist and it seemed a shame to give up on the first one. Not a book I would recommend.

The Last Hundred Days

Title: The Last Hundred Days

Author: Patrick McGuiness

Number of pages: 356

Started: 11 September 2011

Finished: 15 September 2011

Opening words:

In 1980s Romania, boredom was a state of extremity. There was nothing neutral about it: it strung you out and stretched you; it tugged away at the bottom of your day like shingle scraping at a boat’s hull. In theWest we’ve always thought of boredom as slack time, life’s lift music sliding off the ear. Totalitarian boredom is different. It’s a state of expectation already heavy with its own disappointment, the event and its anticipation braided together in a continuous loop of tension and anti-climax.

You can find the first chapter by following a link on this page.

Plot summary:

The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows. In The Last 100 Days, Patrick McGuinness creates an absorbing sense of time and place as the city struggles to survive this intense moment in history. He evokes a world of extremity and ravaged beauty from the viewpoint of an outsider uncomfortably, and often dangerously, close to the eye of the storm as the regime of 1980s Romania crumbles to a bloody end.

What I thought:

By the time I read this book, I was definitely suffering from “gate-fever”. This was the last of the Booker’s that I intended to read (as I had ruled out reading The Stranger’s Child due to bad reviews from others I knew who had read it) and I am not sure I really ended on a high.

I had slightly feared that this book might be a bit like reading an academic text pretending to be a work of fiction. But that certainly wasn’t the case. But still I found it somewhat dry. I also looked up one of the events it referred to, but it wasn’t actually true. This doesn’t mean that the whole book wasn’t true (or that works of fiction have to be accurate in their portrayal of real people and events), but it just didn’t sit well with me.

I thought this book had potential, but that it didn’t necessarily live up to it.

On Canaan's Side

Title: On Canaan’s Side

Author: Sebastian Barry

Number of pages:

Started: 20 August 2011

Finished: 22 August 2011

Opening words:

Bill is gone.

What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?

It might not be much more than silence, and certainly a small slight sound.

When I was four I owned a porcelain doll given me by a strange agency. My mother’s sister, who lived down in Wicklow, had kept it from her own childhood and that of her sister, and gave it to me as a sort of keepsake of my mother. At four such a doll may be precious for other reasons, not least her beauty. I can still see the painted face, calm and oriental, and the blue silk dress she wore. My father much to my puzzlement was worried by such a gift. It troubled him in a way I had no means to understand. He said it was too much for a little girl, even though the same little girl he himself loved with a complete worship.

One Sunday about a year after I was first given it, I insisted on bringing it to mass with me, despite the long and detailed protestations of my father, who was religious in the sense he hoped there was an afterlife. He bet all his heart on that. Somehow a doll was not a fitting mass-goer in his estimation.

Read the first chapter here

You can find a video here of the author reading an extract: here

Plot summary:

Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan’s Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger.

At once epic and intimate, Lilly’s narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war, family-ties and love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry's exquisite prose and gift for storytelling.

What I thought:

On Canaan’s Side was the story of Lilly Bere from birth through to her death. It started in Ireland and ended in the United State’s – Canaan’s Side. I was not overly enamoured with the Irish parts of this tale, but preferred the parts set in America. This was certainly quite a depressing tale, with the major theme running through it being death. It starts with the death of Lilly’s grandson, which was the latest in a lifetime of deaths.

The book was well written, but never truly engaged me.

The Third Policeman

Title: The Third Policeman

Author: Flann O’Brien

Number of pages: 240

Started: 13 February 2011

Finished: 20 February 2011

Opening words:

Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the while idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring a spade. He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.


Plot summary:

A thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt, 'The Third Policeman' is comparable only to 'Alice in Wonderland' as an allegory of the absurd. Distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy, 'The Third Policeman' is unique in the English language.

What I thought:

This was a very strange book. It started well, but then went off into the realms of bicycle worship. I guess the clues were there with the author being compared to James Joyce, but the book was certainly one of the odder books that I have read, and, for me, not in a good way.

This book was only published posthumously because it was turned down by the publisher. I have to say that if they made that decision based on the likely mass appeal of the book, I can see why. A strange read and not one that I would highly recommend.

Room

Title: Room

Author: Emma Donoghue

Number of pages: 321

Started: 13 September 2010

Finished: 16 September 2010

Opening words:

Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. "Was I minus numbers?"
"Hmm?" Ma does a big stretch.
"Up in Heaven. Was I minus one, minus two, minus three—?"
"Nah, the numbers didn't start till you zoomed down."
"Through Skylight. You were all sad till I happened in your tummy."
"You said it." Ma leans out of Bed to switch on Lamp, he makes everything light up whoosh.
I shut my eyes just in time, then open one a crack, then both.
"I cried till I didn't have any tears left," she tells me. "I just lay here counting the seconds."
"How many seconds?" I ask her.
"Millions and millions of them."
"No, but how many exactly?"
"I lost count," says Ma.

Read a longer extract here.

Plot summary:

It’s Jack’s birthday, and he’s excited about turning five.

Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside . . .

Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.


What I thought:

I am not sure what I made of this book. It is certainly not the type of book I would normally read, but that was part of the appeal of reading the Booker prize shortlist – to challenge my normal reading choices.

This book is told from the perspective of a five year old who has spent his whole life in a 11 by 11 foot room, along with his mother who was kidnapped seven years previously. It took me a while to warm to the writing style. The boy, Jack, refers to inanimate objects as though they are an active part of his life, and because they have that role it slightly changes the construction of a normal sentence. For example:

“Ma leans out of Bed to switch on Lamp, he makes everything light up whoosh.”

However, after I read the first 30 pages or so, I put the book down for a few hours and when I returned to it, I had come to terms with this style.

The other thing that slightly frustrated me about the book was that because it was told by a five year old he didn’t have the insight or the ability to process why others were acting in the way that they did. Why did his mum get upset? Why did his mum not tell him the truth about why they lived their lives in this small confined space? But on reflection, I wonder if that is actually a strength of the book. Because there is no analysis of the characters or by the characters it means that you, the reader, have to do it instead – and that is maybe no bad thing because it makes you think about the novel and what Jack is seeing and understanding about life around him.

The book also made me wonder how accurate portrayal of a five year old Jack was. At times he seemed too intelligent and other times too naïve. But then that opens up the question of how constantly living with an adult, who is the only person you interact with would affect your ability to comprehend the world around you. So, again, it is not clear, and it is for you to decide for yourself.

I think it is a book that is ideal to debate with other people. I talked to someone at work who is also doing this same challenge and read it before me and I went from saying I was a bit ambivalent about the book to us having a lengthy discussion about a whole range of things about the book.

So, it was a readable book (once I got past my concerns about the writing style) and raised lots of dilemmas, but the jury is still out on this one as far as I am concerned. But, that said, I would recommend reading it because I think it is one of those books that is down to the reader to interpret what you take from it.

The Story of Lucy Gault

Title: The Story of Lucy Gault

Author: William Trevor

Number of pages: 228

Started: 14 June 2010

Finished: 16 June 2010

Opening words:

Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one. Aiming above the trespassers' heads in the darkness, he fired the single shot from an upstairs window and then watched the three figures scuttling off, the wounded one assisted by his companions.

Plot summary:
Summer, 1921. Eight-year-old Lucy Gault clings to the glens and woods above Lahardane - the home her family is being forced to abandon. She knows the Gaults, as Protestants, are no longer welcome in Ireland and that danger threatens. She is headstrong and decides that somehow she must force her parents into staying. But the path she chooses ends in disaster.
One chance event, unwanted and unexpected, will blight the lives of the Gaults for years to come and bind each of them in different ways to this one moment in time forever. Trevor's novel, shortlisted for both the Booker and Whitbread Prizes, beautifully evokes rural Ireland and the tensions existing there, but also delicately portrays the terrible impact of mere chance on our lives.

See an interesting book group discussion on the book here.

What I thought:

I am not really sure about this book. It was well written and the words flowed off the page. It was a book that also had an underlying sadness to it and (without revealing the major part of the plot) you really wanted the situation to get resolved because things could have been so different if it wasn’t for a few actions that came together.

I thought the characters, particularly Lucy Gault, perhaps lacked a bit of depth and that the book would have been enhanced by a bit more reflection on how she felt about and dealt with things. But it was a readable book and I would be interested in reading another of William Trevor’s books.

Amongst Women

Title: Amongst Women

Author: John McGahern

Number of pages: 184

Started: 15 January 2010

Finished: 21 January 2010

Opening words:

As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children and houses of their own in Dublin and London. Now they could not let him slip away.

Plot summary:

A lyric lament for Ireland, McGahern's lovingly observed family drama is dominated by an almost pathetic paterfamilias. Gruff, blustering Michael Moran, former guerrilla hero in the Irish War of Independence, is a man "in permanent opposition." Now a farmer, he vents his compulsion to dominate, his cold fury and sense of betrayal on his three teenage daughters. Yearning for approval but fearing his flare-ups, they periodically beat a path back to the farmhouse from London and Dublin, then take flight again, both proud and dependent. Moran's second wife, Rose, much younger than he, displays saintly patience in her attempts to heal this splintering family. Moran also claims a renegade son in London who is "turning himself into a sort of Englishman," and another son driven away by Moran's threats of beatings.

What I thought:

This book was an interesting read. To a degree, not a lot happened. It centred around the controlling nature of the father, Moran, who sought to guide his children (and others) in the belief that he was a decent man who only wanted what was best for them. In reality, he held his children back and they escaped him by moving to places like Dublin or London – and yet still they were drawn back at various times, and somehow all but one could not let him go. It was quite a dark book and one that did not show a good side of family life. One to ponder I think.

The Book of Lost Things

Title: The Book of Lost Things

Author: John Connolly

Number of pages: 342

Started: 5 February 2009

Finished: 7 February 2009

Opening words:

Once upon a time—for that is how all stories should begin—there was a boy who lost his mother.

He had, in truth, been losing her for a very long time. The disease that was killing her was a creeping, cowardly thing, a sickness that ate away at her from the inside, slowly consuming the light within, so that her eyes grew a little less bright with each passing day and her skin a little more pale.

And as she was stolen away from him, piece by piece, the boy became more and more afraid of finally losing her entirely. He wanted her to stay. He had no brothers and no sisters, and while he loved his father it would be true to say that he loved his mother more. He could not bear to think of a life without her.

The boy, whose name was David, did everything that he could to keep his mother alive. He prayed. He tried to be good, so that she would not be punished for his mistakes. He padded around the house as quietly as he was able, and kept his voice down when he was playing war games with his toy soldiers. He created a routine, and he tried to keep to that routine as closely as possible, because he believed in part that his mother's fate was linked to the actions he performed. He would always get out of bed by putting his left foot on the floor first, then his right. He always counted up to twenty when he was brushing his teeth, and he always stopped when the count was completed. He always touched the taps in the bathroom and the handles of the doors a certain number of times: odd numbers were bad but even numbers were fine, with two, four and eight being particularly favourable, although he didn't care for six because six was twice three and three was the second part of thirteen, and thirteen was very bad indeed.

Plot summary:

'Once upon a time, there was a boy who lost his mother !' As twelve-year-old David takes refuge from his grief in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother, he finds the real world and the fantasy world begin to blend. That is when bad things start to happen. That is when the Crooked Man comes. And David is violently propelled into a land populated by heroes, wolves and monsters in his quest to find the legendary Book of Lost Things.

What I thought:

This book was ok. It’s not really my favourite kind of read, a sort of fantasy/ fairytale type book. It is rather gruesome in places, so perhaps not the normal take of fairytales, but certainly interesting. It was an interesting premise, and there were probably layers to this book that I missed but whilst the book was perfectly readable, I did not find it quite as engaing as I might have hoped.

If you read the edition with the red cover, there are about 150pages at the end that explain all the fairytales that the book then builds on etc, which can help to set the scene of it more.

You can also look at the website The Book of Lost Things for some more insights.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Title: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Author: John Boyne

Number of pages: 216

Started: 29 September 2008

Finished: 30 September 2008

Opening words:

One afternoon, when Bruno came home from school, he was surprised to find Maria, the family’s maid – who always kept her head bowed and never looked up from the carpet – standing in his bedroom, pulling all his belongings out of the wardrobe and packing them in four large wooden crates, even the things he’d hidden at the back that belonged to him and were nobody’s else’s business.

Plot summary:

The story of "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about. If you do start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno. (Though this isn't a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. We hope you never have to cross such a fence.

(From the back of the book)

What I thought:

I am not sure what to make of this book. It was perfectly readable but I just could not work out what the point of it was. I thought the blurb on the back of the book (as above in the plot summary) was intriguing, but actually somewhat misleading because it could clearly have been summarised on the back of the book. But as a marketing tool it did work, I guess. Anyway, this was a children’s book but I think it was too subtle for a lot of children and there is every chance that a number who read this would have no idea what it was about. For adults, I think it would be a bit frustrating because it was very simplistic and it seems unlikely the child in it could really know so little of what was going on. But it is billed as a fable and perhaps simplicity should therefore be what it is about and trying to make it into something complex or more profound misses the point.

I did actually see the end of the book coming from a long way off and so that wasn’t really a surprise, although perhaps that says more about my cynical brain than being a poor reflection on the book.

You can read the first chapter here.