Andrew Blackman » contemporary fiction

“Saturday” by Ian McEwan

Andrew Blackman — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:42:31 +0000

Not my favourite McEwan – that is Atonement by a long way. This was OK, a more meditative book, full of long meandering passages from the head of Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon living in Marylebone with his successful wife and talented blues-musician son, awaiting the return from France of his beautiful and talented and successful daughter. A man so ridiculously successful, in fact, that you just know something really bad is going to happen to him. He’s got a big metaphorical “KICK ME” sign taped to his back from page 1.

There was a lot of interesting stuff in here, lots of musing about life in London after 9/11 and before the war in Iraq, the uncertainty, the tension, the threats everywhere. I liked the way McEwan explored the interplay between the personal and the political. I liked the way that after a long, slow build-up, things moved very fast at the end.

What I didn’t like so much was that the entire novel was set in a single day and McEwan was utterly faithful to the tedium of the average person’s day, describing everything in equal detail, the mundane and the serious. When the mundane stuff was accompanied by thought-provoking musing on the nature of contemporary London life, it was fine. When it wasn’t, it was pretty unbearable. The long description of a game of squash was one of the most boring passages I have ever read (well, OK, skimmed).

The ending was great, though, and overall I would recommend this book – not whole-heartedly as I would with Atonement, but I’d recommend it nonetheless.

“Best European Fiction 2010″ edited by Aleksandar Hemon

Andrew Blackman — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:46:23 +0000

This was a very interesting collection of short stories from around Europe. There’s one piece from each country, so it really felt like a broad and varied collection rather than being weighted toward particular countries. One thing I didn’t like is that some of them were extracts from longer pieces, which I don’t think works very well. A short story is crafted specifically to fit that length; an extract from a novel, no matter how well-written, often feels dissatisfying to me because I feel as if I’m missing things by not reading the rest of it. Also I found it strange that, despite the 2010 in the title, the stories themselves were written between 2006 and 2009. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but I like the idea of surveying the best things written in one particular year. The 2010 just means that this is the inaugural edition of what will be an annual collection.

The stories gave me some really interesting ideas. They were so varied in style and subject matter, and even the ones I didn’t like at least had a fresh and interesting style. Nothing was boring or predictable – I didn’t enjoy all of the stories, but never because it felt too similar to something I’d read before. Some of my favourites were:

Bulbjerg by Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark): an idyllic family walk in the countryside that quickly becomes nightmarish – they get lost, the boy falls off his bike and is seriously injured, the husband confesses to an affair with the wife’s sister…

Resistance by Stephan Enter (Netherlands): reminiscence about a childhood chess teacher, which really captured well the dynamics of boyhood, the difficulty of escaping from the group mentality, the ease of going along with the crowd rather than standing up for a teacher who is different, better, but easy to mock.

Friedmann Space by Victor Pelevin (Russia): clever satire of the greed, chaos and corruption of post-Soviet Russia, in which the phrase “money attracts money” is taken literally and a character goes around Moscow carrying thousands of dollars of cash and ends up finding a lot more. I liked how the writer used the language of science to add a faux seriousness to a comic tale.

I also appreciated the useful information at the back of the book: very full author bios/personal statements, translator bios, and a list of online resources for literature in each of the European countries featured in the collection. I can’t recommend all the stories in the collection, but the book overall was worth reading. I will definitely be reading the 2011 edition.

British “state of the nation” novels

Andrew Blackman — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:31:15 +0000

One of my fellow Legend Press authors, Mark Piggott, wrote an interesting article in the Independent about ‘state of the nation’ novels. I thought it would be complaining that nobody’s writing about contemporary British issues these days – there’s been quite a bit of that recently, because historical novels have been getting a lot of the awards and attention lately. But he takes a more interesting line, noting that historical novels have been getting the attention, but pointing out the wealth of books tackling contemporary issues (of which mine is listed as one, although that’s not the only reason I liked the article!).

Piggott also explores the difficulty of writing a ‘state of the nation’ novel, getting good quotes from some major British literary figures. Martin Amis thinks it’s down to a lack of national pride – the US now produces more state of the nation novels, because it’s the centre of the earth; British novelists are more like dissidents. Toby Litt says that writers are trying it, but in a “more focused” way – “they don’t do sweep, they do stab.” Piggott also makes the point that sometimes it’s new arrivals who most effectively hold a mirror up to British society, and so the place to look is more on the margins than on the Booker Prize shortlist.

Anyway, as someone who aspires to describe at least a part of the state of the nation in his writing, I thought it was a good exploration of the difficulties and possibilities of doing this, and also a guide to some of the more interesting names in British literature.