Family Matters

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry

Nariman Vakeel is a retired English teacher, living in a large flat in Mumbai with his two step-children, Coomy and Jal.  He suffers from Parkinson’s and is cared for by his step-children, who resent his frailty and blame him for the death of their mother.  The one bright spark in all their lives is Nariman’s daughter Roxana, born after his marriage to Jal and Coomy’s mother.  Their love and affection for her seems to be the glue that holds the family together, despite the simmering resentment that Nariman bought Roxana and her husband Yezad a flat as a wedding gift.  When Nariman breaks his leg on an evening walk, Coomy seizes upon a plan to save her the stress of having to care for him herself – make Roxana do it.  So she arranges for an ambulance to transport Nariman to Roxana’s tiny two-room apartment, shared with Yezad and their sons Jehangir and Murad.

This was nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize (won by The Life of Pi) and I’ve previously written about my feelings about Booker Prize novels, but this is another one that doesn’t fit with the typical Booker profile (by which I mean unreadable).  2002 was clearly a year judged by people who don’t hate books, unlike the other years.  Family Matters was recommended to me by my good friend Ellen* as being “excellent” and I must say, I can’t fault her judgement.  When I saw on the cover that it was Booker-nominated, I did think uh-oh… and was very pleasantly surprised.  This is eminently readable, coherent and balanced.  It paints a portrait of family life with delicate brushstrokes, giving prominence to each person in turn but without at any point being too “writerly”.  By which I mean, the silly tics that writers sometimes give characters (and actors give their portrayals – Nic Cage, I’m thinking of you) to “round them out” and “make them more real”.  Jehangir loves Enid Blyton books and secretly wishes he was called John, but then he’s a child, entranced by the otherness of Blyton’s England.  It fits perfectly with the story.

Yezad is prone to violent tempers and resents the attention his wife is now lavishing on her father, rather than on him.  The main plot of the book concerns the Chenoy family’s interaction with Nariman and his step-children, particularly relating to the cost of his painkillers and Parkinson’s medicine and the family’s struggles to make ends meet, whilst the sub-plot relates to Yezad’s relationship with his employer.  He works at Bombay Sporting and his boss, Mr Kapur, has ambitions to enter the local political scene, to fight against the far-right party Shiv Sena.  For me, this was the weakest part of the novel.  I didn’t have any frame of reference to put it into and so didn’t fully understand the subtle undertones that were present whenever Mistry made mention of the party.  Yezad tries to trick his boss, who is a Bombayophile (you get my meaning), into running for a political seat after being threatened by two actors playing Shiv Sena members.  They request that he change the name of the store from Bombay Sporting to Mumbai Sporting, a seemingly small trick with consequences that quickly spiral out of control for both Yezad and Mr Kapur.

If I was to list what happened in the course of this novel, it would be a mainly be a series of small and fairly inconsequential events – characters cooking food, going to the bathroom, trying to sleep – but that was what made it so wonderful for me.  Mistry infuses everyday situations with warmth and humour, making the most boring interactions a reflection of the mood of the family.  It’s rare to read a novel that is so happy to move slowly.  Wonderful.

*She’s one of those Foreign types who come over here and steal our jobs.  Like my American mum and Irish boyfriend.  Damn them all.

Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Thomas Cromwell was born to a poor family in Putney, his father an abusive blacksmith.  Having been beaten one too many times, a young Cromwell escapes to the continent.  We rejoin him some years later, now back in London, married and adviser to Thomas Wolsey, cardinal and Lord Chancellor.  The King, Henry VIII, has tasked Wolsey with annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so he can remarry and produce a viable heir.  With Wolsey’s fortune on the wane, Cromwell must bully, manipulate, charm and bribe those around him to keep his own position.

This won the 2009 Booker Prize, which I have a bit of a potted history with – I decided to read all the Booker prize winners when I was 19.  Four books later I decided that the Booker prize, by and large, awarded books that were pretentious and unreadable.  One of those books was awesome – The Life of Pi - and the other three were among the most annoying, stylistic and awful books I’ve had the misfortune to read in my life.  I struggled to the end with two of them – God of Small Things and The Famished Road – with no idea what was actually going on (particularly in the latter) and gave up entirely on Vernon God Little, something I have only done once or twice in my life.

So, you might well be asking me what on earth I’m doing with the latest Booker prize winner in my hands.  Well, I would reply, for one thing, I’m an idiot.  Surely you know that?  For another, just because the other Booker prize winners sucked doesn’t mean this one will.  I’m all for giving fifth or sixth chances you know. But, you might ask, why would you pay good money for something that has a fair-to-middling chance of being pants?  I got it from the library! I would reply, somewhat smugly.  I waited four months for this thing – I was 96th in line when I reserved it.  Then, I might confess to you that secretly, it was more about watching that little number go down each week than actually getting the book… (I refer you to my earlier comment: I’m an idiot). Had I been thinking, it might have occurred to me that the little number was going down pretty quickly, given that it was a hefty book and people had it out for three weeks at a time.  And that perhaps, possibly, people were getting as far as the end of the first section and realising it was style over substance, that it was a tad unreadable and bringing it back to the library as a result.

I’m interested and faintly knowledgeable about this period of history: I’ve read all the Shardlake books released thus far, which Thomas Cromwell stars in (up until his death anyhow); I did a degree in English Lit so have read plenty about Shakespeare and the contemporary society (OK, it was largely post-Cromwell, but not very post-); plus I remember the National Curriculum being brought in and the history of Henry VIII featured heavily.  Sadly, I was 10 when we studied Henry VIII and didn’t really broach the political subtexts and machinations by Wolsey, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and various other noblemen.  Nor – importantly – what their real names were.  The latter would have been particularly helpful as Mantel switches between referring to the character by name, position or title without many references as to who does what, meaning that following descriptions can be headache-inducing at times.

More annoyingly, she makes terrible use of pronouns, so “he” in any given section of text can refer to the person being described, the person they are thinking about, or – crucially – someone else entirely, who isn’t even in that scene.  Often “he” means Cromwell, whether he’s mentioned by name or not, so once I worked that out it became a teeny bit easier to read.  It’s consistently trying to work out what’s going on when people are holding a conversation, as Mantel seems to be allergic to the use of dialogue tags.

I kept at this, despite not really knowing what was going on, despite not particularly enjoying it and despite accumulating a fine from the library for being 8 days (count ‘em!) overdue – because I chose to keep and read it rather than return it and save the money, like an idiot.  I took breaks whilst reading this to finish Smoke and Mirrors as well as 2 Diana Wynne Jones books, in part the straightforward language was a welcome relief.  So why did I stick with it?

1. Because I really hate not finishing books.
2. Because when I’ve invested my time and effort into doing something, no matter how ridiculous it is, I have trouble admitting that the effort and time were wasted – which explains why I spent so much time playing Farmville until recently.
3. Because I refuse to be defeated by the stupid thing.

So there you go – three daft reasons to read Wolf Hall.  And I still didn’t finish it, because I got to page 423 and realised I just couldn’t take it any more.  I gave it every opportunity to be good and it failed me, over and over again.  I feel that I spent enough time staring at this stupid thing – including waiting an hour for a friend in a café, even though I worked out she wasn’t coming pretty quickly, because I thought I might be able to get a bit further through – to be able to rate it adequately: