required reading

Mister Pip is my second Booker shortlisted read, and it's the novel, yes apart from the McEwan, that everyone is talking about.

It tells the story of Matilda, then a young girl, now the narrator of this novel, and an episode in her childhood in Bougainville, during the time of the blockade by Papua New Guinea. At that time, almost all the white people left the island, leaving only Mr Watts. Mr Watts, or Pop Eye, as he was known to the children, took over the teaching at Matilda's school, blending the wisdom of his pupil's parents with recitations from Great Expectations. The children listen to Great Expectations from cover to cover, and Matilda is spellbound, fascinated by her ability to slip inside the skin of a white boy named Pip, from Victorian England.

But the presence of Pip in the village community causes problems, first between Matilda and her mother, and then as a source of confusion for the redskin fighters, with disastrous consequences.

The novel's turn to scenes of violence is expected, by the time it arrives, but it came as a horrible, sickening shock all the same. Matilda's narrative withholds the worst from us, until the moment comes, just as she, as a child, was protected from full knowledge by her mother and the other adults around her. As readers, we are plunged from a quaint, twee story of some villagers in an island paradise, into the story of a civil war. The sudden bursts of horror reminded me of The Road, yet were all the more forceful for the knowledge that this events are drawn from recent history. Being written by a middle aged, white, outsider, Lloyd Jones is playing with fire as he attempts to represent this history to a white, middle class audience, yet his novel is all about ignorance and storytelling. Just as Matilda and her classmates are kept ignorant of the worst of the warring factions in Bougainville, she is also unaware of the fact that Mr Watts has been reading an abridged version of Great Expectations to her class, with the hard bits, and the hard-to-swallow bits, neatly excised. And so we, as readers, are challenged to question our attitude to literature, as we tumble into the awfulness of the later part of the novel. Does it neatly protect us from reality, or does it perform the task of informing and transforming us?

The prose is clear and charming, the story is fascinating, and I particulalrly enjoyed the thorny relationship between Maltilda and her mother. However, I felt too manipulated by Jones to really love this novel. The depiction of village life was deliberately sentimental, in order to make the horrors of war stand out more starkly. The reading of Charles Dickens was oh so clever a device to illustrate the idea of leaving, and improvement. The dichotomy between traditional values and western intellectual 'freedom' a little too simply rendered. The unravelling of mysteries at the end, and the destiny of Matilda a little too neatly satisfying. Despite the tropical setting, Mister Pip left me a little cold.

There are hints of Autumn in the air; a cool and fresh morning bringing a welcome end to the claggy warmth that passed for Summer. And I'm lucky enough to have a good walk to work, over the marshes past Mesopotamia, through the university parks which are bursting with colour, and into the picturesque and oh-so-trendy Jericho. Someone had put a lilly on top of a phone box.

The world depicted in The Road has no resemblance to the world I walked into this morning, so that it is strange and alienating even to think about it. This novel, by Cormac McCarthy tells of a father and son who are walking across a postapocalyptic America, following the road south. Their world has suffered what we presume to be a nuclear holocaust: everything is dead, everything is grey. They scavenge for food, they avoid any other human beings, and they follow the road.

The novel is unrelentingly bleak (gray, black, ash, dead, cold - all these words recur with numbing frequency), punctured with moments of sheer horror. The vision is lightened, perhaps, by the depiction of the relationship between the man and his child, though unlike others, I did not find this to be over-sentimental, but rather desperate. The dialogue between the two is stripped bare of punctuation and is repetitive to the point almost of absurdity:

You think we're going to die, dont you?
I dont know.
We're not going to die.
Okay.
But you dont believe me.
I dont know.
Why do you think we're going to die.
I dont know.
Stop saying I dont know.
Okay.
Why do you think we're going to die?
We dont have anything to eat.
We'll find something.
Okay.
How long do you think people can go without food?
I dont know.
But how long do you think?
Maybe a few days.
And then what? You fall over dead?
Yes.
Well you dont. It takes a long time. We have water. That's the most important thing. You dont last very long without water.
Okay.
But you dont believe me.
I dont know.
He studied him. Standing there with his hands in the pockets of the outsized pinstriped suitcoat.
Do you think I lie to you?
No.
But you think I might lie to you about dying?
Yes.
Okay. I might. But we're not dying.
Okay.

All that makes our world so rich and confusing has been stripped away: 'the world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entries'. What is left when society, infrastructure, and culture are gone is the relationship between the father and the child. This is what is essential, McCarthy seems to say. This relationship is one of love and protection, because the father and son are 'the good guys', if we use the language of the novel. When every part of life is pared away, the way we choose to act is either unselfish, good, and loving, or it is selfish, murderous, and animalistic.

I found this to be the most problematic aspect of the novel. McCarthy wants us to feel the agonising uncertainty in the battle between good and evil. There are so many 'bad guys' in this world, and so few 'good guys' left; can the good guys stay alive, and 'carry the flame'; who will triumph at the end? By implication, McCarthy seems to include us with the good guys; certainly our sympathies lie unreservedly with the boy and his father. Then how is it that there are so many of the 'bad guys'? And who were they before this apocalypse? What did they look like? Could we point to them and say that, stripped down to their core, they are inhumane and evil? Were they, are they, any different from us, now? The world of good and evil that McCarthy paints in The Road belongs to the child; for a novel almost entirely composed of the adjective 'gray', it is surprisingly black and white.

Maggie O'Farrell drew on her own experiences for her 2005 prizewinner The Distance Between Us. The prize in question is the Somerset Maugham award, presented by the Society of Authors, and the experiences are a sojourn in Hong Kong, and missing a year of school because of a viral infection. O'Farrell neatly divides these two life events between the two strands of the story she tells in The Distance Between Us. The first strand is that of Stella and Nina, close sisters who share a fierce bond, intensified by events of their childhood that involve a viral illness. And the second strand belongs to Jake, a Westerner who has grown up in Hong Kong, and who returns to his home country under strange circumstances.

The Distance Between Us is a story about psychological and emotional distance: you might guess this from the title without too much difficulty. The distances invoked are geographical: between Hong Kong and Great Britain, between Great Britain and New Zealand, between Scotland and London. The characters spend plenty of time on the phone, calling long distance; it's one of the little motifs of the book. And, unsurprisingly, the distance is also a psychological gap. The front cover of my edition hints at this: two girls standing side by side, almost touching, dressed alike, represent the closeness of Nina and Stella. I never had a sister (though I pleaded for one), but O'Farrell does a great job of evoking the almost claustrophobic intensity of this sibling relationship; when thinking about the book I often misremember the pair as twins. Nina depends upon Stella, unusually for an older sibling, phoning her two or three times a day. But she also knows her thoroughly and intimately.

O'Farrell also portrays the emotional distance between Jake and his partner Mel, neatly conjuring the awkwardness and painfulness of their relationship, which seems to have come to a dead stop in the water.

And the final distance is that between Stella and Jake. Their lives aren't in any way 'parallel', as the book jacket had me believe, unless we all live lives that are parallel to the lives of other human beings, but they do converge in a way that seems unlikely from the first few pages of the novel, but is soon pretty predictable.

Both the pairing of Nina and Stella, and Jack and Nina niggled at me as I put the book down for the last time. I had not seen any evidence of mutual understanding between Jack and Stella; their relationship seemed to be formed from a coup de foudre, and ended in a way fit for a Hollywood romance. Stella is, at once point in the story, presented with a choice between Nina and a college boyfriend. But at no point does the author address the uneasy question of whether either Stella or Nina could suffer any relationship to be closer than their sisterly one. The obvious denouement of Jack ending up with Stella in his arms (there, I've said it, but it won't have come as a surprise to you) is rather unsatisfactory, when you look at it in these terms. Their relationship threatens never to be as close or to have the primacy of Nina and Stella's, but the author never explores whether this is problematic.

I've touched on the implausibilty of the Hollywood ending of the novel. In fact the whole novel reads like a cinematic experience:

Nina places the phone on the floor next to her and dials the code for London, then the number. There is a short pause before the pulsing purr of a distant ringing.

She waits, frowning, picking apart one of the sandwiches Richard made for her that morning, extracting the silvery half moons of onion. He knows she doesn't eat raw onion. Then there's the gasp of electronic ether before the hiss of a voicemail recording: Hi, you've reached Stella Gilmore in Production. I'm either away from my desk or on another-

O'Farrell's style is so clear that the extract above allows me to visualize what is going on absolutely perfectly. But I found it more than a little mundane: one stage direction* follows another. And when I am given more information ('He knows she doesn't eat raw onion') it seems to be superfluous. Richard making Nina sandwiches that Nina feels the need to pick apart tells me enough about their relationship without needing to be told that she knows that he knows that she doesn't like onion. Perhaps I'm being picky here, but flicking through the pages confirms the truth of this observation - O'Farrell is clear to the point of absolute bordedom. I don't think I've ever come across a sentence in literary fiction quite so banal as this one:

The noise of the street rises, as if someone's turned up the volume.

But the greatest crime comes with the 'dizzying twist' (Daily Mail) at the end of the novel. It is clear that the novel is leading up to a revelation of some great proportion. By page 8 we know that some event of massive significance has happened in Stella's life. But when the revelation arrived, I found that it did not shock me at all. O'Farrell took the coward's route, shying away from allowing her heroine to be at all culpable for what occurs, and exaggerating the class bully, who is an instrumental character in the ending, to unbelievable proportions of inhumanity in order to achieve this. Emblazoned on the back cover of the book is a quote from Amanda Craig, in The Times, who says that O'Farrell is 'really remarkable among modern novelists' in making us 'care passionately about her characters and their fates'. This certainly wasn't true for me. And I got the impression that the only thing O'Farrell cared about was sewing up a neat, romantic, unthreatening story for the Hollywood producers to option.

(*Thanks, Ang!)