Andrew Blackman

After 11 months in front of a computer screen, I am taking some time off. Many thanks for all your wonderful, thought-provoking comments over the year, and wishing you all a happy holiday season and a great 2010. See you next year!!

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized

“Set your life on fire.  Seek those who fan your flames.”

– Meulana Rumi (thanks to Elaine for the suggestion!)

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

The narrative style was very interesting in this book. In the present, Hans van den Broek is at home with his wife Rachel in London, receiving a phone call to say that his old friend Chuck Ramkissoon has been found murdered in New York. The novel is written more or less as Hans would have thought about Chuck after that phone call – in a jumble of memories, chronologically haphazard and leaping from one anecdote to another more by association than logic.

Surprisingly, it works very well. Even though the action can be in Brooklyn at one moment and in the Holland of Hans’s childhood the next, I never lost the thread. The novel is just very well put together, and slowly out of these disparate anecdotes a picture builds up of Hans, Chuck and their mysterious friendship.

Another surprising thing about this novel is that I wasn’t particularly interested in Hans or his life, but I kept on reading anyway. The obvious “hook” is the murder of Chuck, stated in the first few pages, and the expectation is that you will find out why he was dumped in the Gowanus Canal with his hands cuffed. But nobody seems very interested – Hans makes a few efforts to call a detective who doesn’t seem to care, and that’s about it. We hear vague allusions to criminal activity, but nothing specific. The novel turns out not to be about Chuck’s murder, or even really about Chuck. It’s about Hans’s attempts to deal with a failing marriage and loneliness in post-9/11 New York City.

To start with, I really disliked Hans. He reminded me a lot of people I knew in a former existence as a corporate banker – from 2000 to 2002 I worked for Citigroup on Wall Street. The emptiness and lack of feeling really depressed me, and I found it hard to care about the problems of such a privileged character – even though I know from personal experience that you can be miserable even when you’re making a lot of money. Hans grew on me as the novel went on, but not very much. So there was really no reason for me to keep reading, but somehow I did, and I enjoyed it. I think it was just the narrative that pulled me along, rewarding me with great descriptions and acute observations about two cities I know very well.

It’s been said that this is a novel about September 11, and also that it’s a novel about cricket, but I don’t think either statement is really true. Both are themes, but there’s a lot else going on. The Netherland of the title is not just about Hans being Dutch. The OED gives the following definition for ‘nether’: “designating a sphere of action or thought existing, or considered as existing below or at a lower level than the usual; esp. in netherland”.  The book explores the layers of New York City, the people living below the well-known Manhattan surface, often ignored and unseen. Hans is also in the nether regions of his life – with his marriage falling apart for reasons that are completely obscure to him, he has nothing left but the familiarity of cricket and the comfort of a friendship with a man he knows both a lot and also very little about.

So the reason I liked the book is that Joseph O’Neill is a very good storyteller. The story didn’t grip me and neither did the characters, but I wanted to read on anyway, just for the pleasure of the words on the page and the clever progressions from anecdote to anecdote and tangent to tangent. After 200 pages or so spent with Hans and Chuck and Rachel, I even started to care about them a little more, but ultimately for me the payoff was the deeper themes that came through – about friendship, and loneliness, and memory and loss. It was just a very well-written, well-constructed novel that succeeded in spite of an apparent lack of interesting features.

Andrew Blackman Joseph O'Neill booker shortlist, joseph o'neill, netherland

OK, I haven’t done any self-promotion on here for a while, so here goes:

BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK!

Thank you.

The reason for this outburst is that my publisher is running a special promotion today – if you buy On the Holloway Road through their website, you get entered into a prize draw to win “a hoard of Legend Press books”. Your purchase also counts as a vote for my book – they’re featuring a different book each day throughout December, and the most popular book gets announced on Christmas Day.

So head over there any time in December, do your Christmas shopping, support a poor struggling writer in these hard winter months, check out the UK’s youngest-run mainstream fiction publisher, and get entered into a prize draw to win a huge stack of books. What’s not to like?

– End of self-promotion –

Andrew Blackman On the Holloway Road legend press, On the Holloway Road, prize draw, win books

I didn’t like this book when I started it. Even when I was browsing it in the bookshop, I wasn’t that keen – I only bought it because it was half-price and it had won the Booker Prize. Surprising, then, that it ended up being one of the best books I’ve read in recent months.

The style grated initially. It’s written as a series of letters from an Indian entrepreneur to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and starts off full of stuff like “Let me tell you about my admiration for the great nation of China…” Fortunately this tails off after a while, and you can forget about Wen Jiabao and listen to the story of Balram’s rise from servant to successful businessman. And in the end, the narrative device does have a clever effect: it allows Balram to talk naturally about his life while also explaining aspects of Indian life that might not otherwise be clear to a foreigner. Wen Jiabao is a stand-in for us, the foreign reader who needs things explained to him. I don’t know if this was a conscious choice by Adiga to give his book both authenticity and international appeal; perhaps Wen Jiabao’s presence has a completely different purpose, and seeing him as a stand-in for me is just Western arrogance! But it works, anyway.

Despite the brief description I gave above, Balram’s story is not a traditional, uplifting rags to riches tale. It’s much darker than that, and much more real. In the traditional rags to riches tale, the protagonist faces lots of obstacles from his humble upbringing, but succeeds through strength of character in overcoming them and achieving the success he or she deserves. The problem with these tales is that they reinscribe some pervasive myths – that being successful is about strength of character, and that riches come to those who deserve them. Accepting these myths leaves you with a feeling that, conversely, those who stay poor must somehow also deserve it – they must somehow have lacked the strength of character to rise above their situation.

Adiga’s book challenges this narrative, replacing it with a darker and, to me, truer one. Balram becomes rich not through virtue or hard work – both of these qualities make him an ideal servant. He gets rich by lying, stealing and killing. This makes him like the other rich characters in the book, who live off extracting rents from the poor, killing those who rebel against them, paying bribes to government ministers, etc. Balram compares India to a rooster coop, in which the majority of people are trapped but don’t try to escape.

A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

Clearly, this is a book about India, and some things are specific to India. The family, for example, is a strong unit in India, and Balram says it is the main way of keeping people trapped – they feel an obligation to their family, so will work hard and not rebel. When Balram does rebel, he assumes that the family of the rich man he murdered will kill all of his family in revenge – it’s the way it works. He does it anyway, because it’s the only way he can see to escape. He must sacrifice everything, from his honesty and morality and upbringing to his entire family. He must be utterly selfish.

I think it would be a mistake to see the book as being only about India, though. Of course the divide between rich and poor there is more extreme than in most other places on Earth. The servitude in which millions of poor people are trapped is almost unimaginable. But it’s still true everywhere, isn’t it, that a tiny percentage of people own the majority of the wealth? Are those people really so superior to the rest of us that they deserve that level of wealth? Do we really live in a meritocracy? Isn’t the accident of birth still incredibly important? Doesn’t every country have its own version of the rooster coop?

Nothing’s black and white, of course, and this is one of the virtues of the book. Although it makes strong points about inequality and justice, the characters still feel real. In a review like this things are necessarily summarised and simplified, but over the course of the novel the characters are fully fleshed out — the rich people are not just symbols of evil and the poor are not all virtuous. Adiga explores the complexities and contradictions while keeping his eye firmly set on his larger targets. I’m not always able to see what the Booker Prize judges see, but in this case I certainly can.

Andrew Blackman Aravind Adiga aravind adiga, book review, booker prize winner, indian literature, white tiger