Fragrant Harbour - John Lanchester

John Lanchester is one of the many authors I have been led to through the pages of Granta, and on the back of ‘Fragrant Harbour’ we can find a bit of blurb from Granta’s current editor praising the merits of Lanchester and his book.

And this is what I would like to discuss here: the back of the book.

Most of us, before ever entering into the realms of the book itself, will read the back of the book where we inevitably find a few complementary quotes from literati and a plot/theme synopsis. All of this is bound to affect our reading in one way or another, from as facile an issue as whether you choose to read the book at all, to the complexities of how it changes our expectations and opinions of the book. If, say, a quote from someone I respect, such as D.J. Taylor or John Carey, appears on the back of a book I am a lot more likely to have a good opinion of it than if a quote from someone I find less eminent, say David Baddiel, appears there.

This is all fairly obvious of course, but how can the plot/theme synopsis contribute to or even ruin our reading?

First of all, we must consider what its function is. Is it there to provide us with a short guide to the book, to help us decide whether we want to read it or not, or is it actually there to tell us how to read? I can think of instances when I have read books that, according to the blurb, provide something along the lines of ‘an explosion of today’s big issues’ or ‘an insight into the collision that takes place when misogyny and philanthropy meet’, only to be left at the end flicking back through the pages for anything akin to the contents promoted on the back.

And how conscious are we of the back page blurb when reading? If we didn’t know the themes mentioned there were supposed to be in the book, would we be able to detect them at all?

To move to the less ambiguous field of plot, is it not spoilt by the revelations on the back? To take Lanchester’s book, which unfortunately I do not have to hand as I left my copy in another country, the lives of two characters, Tom Stewart and Matthew Ho are pretty well exposed on the back page, which, considering that the structure of the book is meant to bring Matthew in very late as the ‘surprise’ grandson of Tom, meant that I was sitting there for 250 pages waiting for Matthew to appear, only to have 90% guessed who he was going to be by the time he appeared. Without the blurb, I wouldn’t have known about Matthew’s existence, and thus the hectic, interwoven Hong Kong life that the author is trying to portray would have had a much more authentic feel to it.

It is not that I am a plot-driven reader, in fact I am vehemently anti-plot in many respects, seeing it as the realm of crime writers and such; and while the literature I like inevitably has a plot, I would never read a book on the basis of its plot, rather on the basis of its themes or its author.

However, in the case of Fragrant Harbour’s, the plot is very much the theme, and vice versa, meaning that the blurb blows the whole structure of the book to smithereens and renders it flaccid and predictable in the process.

Happy To Be Here - Garrison Keillor

I picked this up after having seen it sitting on the shelf in Sidcup’s now defunct Oxfam Bookshop for months and months. There were quite a few Garrison Keillor books, and having read nothing by him or heard anything of him I simply plumped for the one with the best cover.

Incidentally, I’ve heard there are many tests for deciding whether you’ll like a book, from the cover selection I employed in Sidcup, to ‘the page 69 test‘, which I now use without fail. Simply pick up the book and read page 69. If you like it, odds are you’ll apparently like the rest of the book, the theory being that page 69 is far enough in to have passed the initial enthusiasm of the author and to have got into the style and plot that the book is likely to stick to.

Anyway, as it turns out Keillor is a humourist who specialises in short, witty stories for publications such as The New Yorker. Not really my preferred cup of tea, but a three-hour bus journey leaves me in want of some light reading (buses are truly one of the least ideal reading environments I can think of, and certainly Italo Calvino doesn’t list them at the start of ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller…’ while considering the most comfortable position to read in:

‘Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.’

Despite the lack of legroom I get into Keillor quite easily, bouncing from story to story with the odd snigger here and titter there, but certainly no guffawing (but then I’ve never been one to laugh out loud while reading, except for on exceptional occasions, with John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ being one of them).

I was most tickled by the story ‘Shy Rights: Why not Pretty Soon?’, in which the attempts to form a movement of shy people are catalogued, and mostly re-buffed by the fact of their being shy.

‘Now is probably as good a time as any for this country to face up to its shameful treatment of the shy and to do something, almost anything, about it. On the other hand, maybe it would be better to wait for a while and see what happens. All I know is that it isn’t easy trying to write a manifesto for a bunch of people who dare not speak their names.’ (p.215)

The narrator also covers the injustices of history in which shy people ’who never sought fame’ are ignored, a man who is too shy to speak up when he is overcharged by $15 for some candy and a ‘dirty’ magazine, and the ‘anti-shy’ sixth amendment, which ’gives the accused the right to confront his accusers’.

Keillor pretty goes by this watchword all along. Take a simple everyday idea, flip it on its head and look at it again. It works nearly every time as he forays through the world of mid-American radio stations and baseball fanatics, but rarely with as much success as in ‘Shy Rights’. He’s like a slightly less psychoanalysis-obsessed version of Woody Allen on the page, and is pleasant enough for it.

Next time I have a daunting bus journey ahead of me, maybe I’ll try and grab myself another Keillor.

On non-mainstream books and getting out of bookshops

One of the guiding principles of this blog is to try and focus on books that are not in the public eye (at least now). Like I stated in my previous post, I feel that a lot of things today are treated as disposable, even if we are getting better at recycling about twenty years too late. News, books, music, cars, clothes – everything is becoming more throwaway, their lifespans reduced to a fraction of what they used to be. People have cars for a year or two then change; cheap clothes hawked by Primark and New Look are worn for that season and then replaced three or four months down the line. How many books do people read twice these days?

There was uproar a couple of years ago when everyone simultaneously seemed to notice for the first time that independent bookshops were rapidly becoming extinct, and the truth is that they were then and still are. And what do we have in their stead? Waterstones and Borders bombarding us with window displays of new shiny covers for the lastest celebrity autobiographies and £4 off stickers. Where is the variety?

In the charity shops!

I can’t remember the last time I paid full-price for a book, or bought a book from a high street retailer. Why bother when I can pick up books for a couple of quid, or hopefully even less, in a charity shop, especially when I can get a nice old edition which offer far more quirks and interest from a design point of view than today’s colourful cartoony fare (I’m thinking David Mitchell, Zadie Smith)? The uniform of the old Penguin paperbacks (see above), and Faber’s running author/title boxes (see below) provide a sort of innocent beauty that today’s multi-coloured explosions could never dream of possessing.


It’s as if the new batch have to hide their interior inadequacies with a show of outer glamour, like the girl with no personality but caked in make-up and tied into a boob tube and mini-skirt, while the earlier designs mentioned had to make no pretence about their appearances, they were happy to simply state their names on their covers, because they had no need to feel anxious about the products within.

Of course, it’s more about marketing than anything. Who wants to buy a book if it doesn’t look good in your hand while you’re reading it on the tube? What’s the point of buying a book if we can’t ogle the author’s posed photograph on the back inside cover?

The other big positive about book shopping in charity shops is that you can have all sorts of odd titles practically forced upon you (“I’m only 50p, how can you not buy me?”) that you would never come across in a chain store. Genres are all shoved together, there’s no recognition of the alphabet in the shelving order, pages are creased and covers are torn in places, but the experience is so much richer, and so are you.

When I used to frequent the big book stores, I’d head straight to the fiction section and then head out. Charity shops forced me to confront other books, and as a result my reading has broadened into biography (see below), travel, science, politics, art and other areas.


I want to make people more aware that books can be read years after they have been published, that they can be picked up at random, that they don’t have to be serialised or to read by a book club, or to have been reviewed in last week’s paper in order for you to read them.

This is why I’m listing the year of publication, place of purchase, cost and cover design of each book I write about alongside its photo, which I will take in a place either appropriate to its setting or where I read it.

Breaking the mold has been an aim of writers through the ages, and publishers and book shops should be looking to do the same. Sadly, they’re only helping to set it at the moment.

Granta 101 and "The News"

So, to the rest of Granta 101. It’s packed as usual with thought-provoking stuff, with a lot of variety, and, what for me makes it one of my most essential reads, the kind of things that I don’t think I’d pick up or come across if it wasn’t for Granta.

The highlight from this issue:

Andrew Hussey’s look into the Paris banlieue provides a look into the anti-French mentality of those who live in the banlieue, everything from their names - “Steve, Marky, Jenyfer, Britney, even Kevin” - to their obsession with English football proclaim and their graffiti emphatically proclaim their position on the outskirts on French society, and their philosophy: “Nique la France!” (“Fuck France!”).

As the word “banlieue” triggered memories of GCSE French for me (“J’habite dans le banlieue de Birmingham”), I was tickled somewhat by Hussey’s observation that “banlieue”, while translated into English as suburb, is in fact a word that strikes fear into the French middle-class – a word close to “hood” or “ghetto” perhaps for English/American ears, and that probably made me sound like a hard nut when I went on a French exchange all those years ago. Beyond the mild humour, it’s intriguing that the Anglomania shown by the young inhabitants of the banlieue today was also shown by the areas first inhabitants around 100 years ago, as they looked to get themselves “houses with gardens on the English model”.

In today’s climate of 24 hour news, I think we are seeing more and more of a tendency for stories to be forgotten very quickly once the initial impact and rush of the new story has passed. Pieces like Hussey’s show us that places and issues still exist, even when newspapers stop writing about them, and I think we need more responsible editors who are prepared to devote column inches to following up news stories after the main events have passed. As Hussey tells us here, the problems in the banlieue are far from gone, even though the huge riots of November 2005 are a fading memory in the minds of many.

What ever happened to Ariel Sharon? Despite the fairly regular presence of Israel in the news, we now hear nothing of this controversial figurehead, whose demise as Prime Minister was completely out of his hands. Is he still alive? A quick google search shows that yes, he is, and is still in a permanently vegetative state, but we’ll probably hear nothing more about him until he finally passes on.

This time next month, how much will we hear about Russia and Georgia?