"A week in December" by Sebastian Faulks

In London, in the week before Christmas 2007:

• a penniless barrister with a schizophrenic brother falls in love with a female tube driver who plays Parallax (second life);
• the Moslem son of a lime pickle manufacturer plans a suicide attack; his father is invested with an OBE
• a bitchy book reviewer waits to see whether he has won a literary prize
• a foreign footballer plays his first matches for his new London club
• and a ruthless hedge fund manager plans to profit from the collapse of a bank while his son smokes skunk

These intertwined lives (there are too many links to be dismissed a coincidence) illustrate the moral bankruptcy of a nation. Faulks laments (several times) his thesis that teachers have given up believing in knowledge and culture. His Moslem fundamentalist sees society through the pitiless eyes of youth: he sees the binge drinking, the pathetic fumblings for sex mistaken for love, the shoddy materialism. And yet his failures such as the tube driver and her barrister boyfriend, suggest that frail, little farting humans, with all our sad illusions, are the only really human people. That what we should fear is certainty: the certainty of Hassan and his Prophet and the certainty of the banker. God and Mammon. Are we a tube train, hurtling through the darkness to rest for a few fragile moments in the light and noise of a station? Or are we a cyclist without lights, making pedestrians leap aside. And in the end, what do we have except love?

This was an interesting book. It kept me reading. But it didn't have the magic of the best the Faulks can do.

January 2011; 390 pages

"Engleby" by Sebastian Faulks

Wow!

The start was spooky. Mike Engleby who surname is mine except for the first three letters, went to grammar school, as I did, and then to boarding school, as I did, where he got put up a year because he was clever, as I did, and then went to Cambridge, as I did. Other items in the biography are not the same: the story is set four or five years before me, his father has died, he steals and sells drugs, he is a loner. He becomes obsessed with a girl student who disappears; he is quizzed by the police. We presume he is in some way responsible. He goes to London and becomes a journalist. Then the girl's body is discovered.

He has a phenomenal memory enabling him to recite large pieces of text (including the diary he has stolen) verbatim which is one hell of an asset for a novelist's narrator! But he is utterly lonely. The first time he talks about sex is in his late twenties. Even his intelligence serves only to isolate him from others.

He has a bleak view of humanity. He believes the speciating moment at which humans split themselves off from the apes is the arrival of consciousness. This he likens to the moment that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and became self-aware. They were expelled from paradise. Consciousness is self-awareness; that faculty which means that men cannot be blissful in ignorance like animals.

“Homo sapiens, this functional ape with the curse of consciousness – that useless gift that allows him, unlike other animals, to be aware of his own futility. The story of Adam and Eve put it with childish but brilliant clarity: Paradise until the moment of self-awareness and then … Cursed. For ever cursed. (Christians call it ‘fallen’, but it was the same thing: the Fall was the acquisition of consciousness.) …. Miguel de Unamuno …. ‘Man, because he is a man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jackass or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease.’”

chapter 10 p256
At the same time Jen, the student he stalks, enjoys life in a "funny low euphoria" brought on by just being 19 and alive and living in a Cambridge of "dirty brick of the miniature terraces and the mist from the river and the cold mornings .... and then the sudden huge vista of a great courtyard ..."(p217).

An enthralling book which took me into the mind of a very strange person and made me realise how similar I am to him.

"The Fatal Englishman" by Sebastian Faulks

This is a collection of "three short lives"; short in the sense that each is less than 110 pages long and short in the sense that none of the three men lived past 32.

Christopher Woods was a promising young English artist who knew Picasso and Cocteau whilst living in Paris in the 1930s. Whilst developing his art he travelled round Europe with his sugar daddy. He painted a portrait of Constant Lambert who named his son 'Kit' (Christopher's nickname). With Ben Nicholson he discovered Alfred Wallis at St Ives and decided to set up an artists' colony there (although he never actually settled there himself, preferring Brittany. Back in London and contemplating marriage he threw himself under a train.

Richard Hillary was a pilot in the Battle of Britain. Having been horribly burned in a crash he was given plastic surgery, wrote a book about his experiences, then talked his way back into RAF flying, crashed again and killed himself and his navigator.

Jeremy Wolfenden was the brilliant son of Jack Wolfenden, a headteacher and civil servant who became famous for chairing the Committee which recommended the repeal of the law against homosexuality. Jeremy was a Colleger at Eton and then, after National Service, went to Oxford. He lived a promiscuous gay life whilst it was still illegal; his friends included Kit Lambert who later managed The Who. He became a reporter for the Times and subsequently the Moscow reporter for the Telegraph. In Moscow he got mixed up with the Secret Intelligence Service (he was friends with and later married the maid who worked for the embassy couple who ran spy Godfrey Wynne who ran Russian Oleg Penkovsky) and the KGB (following a honey trap with a Polish boy or possibly a Russian waiter or possibly both). Later he went to Moscow; after the FBI reactivated him as a spy he drank himself to death.

On Green Dolphin Street by Faulks (also reviewed in this blog) is clearly based on Wolfenden's life.

Faulks writes beautifully and I found this a fascinating book.

"On Green Dolphin Street" by Sebastian Faulks

I found this book in the library of the Hotel Majestic Palace in Sorrento and quicklyrealised it was the only readable thing there. Actually it was a fantastic find.

Charlie is a diplomat at the Washington Embassy at the start of 1960; he is falling apart through a combination of financial problems, a general world-weariness and depression, and the excessive amounts of alcohol he drinks to keep the blues away. Mary, his wife, falls for Frank, a journalist assigned to cover the Kennedy-Nixon election. As their affair develops she has to choose between her family life with her alcoholic husband and her children (sent to boarding school in England) and her dying mother and grieving father, and the passionate love she feels for Frank.

Faulks handles with brilliance the feel of the age, the children doing A-bomb drill, the jazz, the cold war (and the scenes in Moscow are stupendous). He writes about the experience of the two men in their respective wars, killing for their country, and their meeting in the mess that is Dien Bien Phu. He writes about grief and alcoholism and passionate love and bereavement and boarding school and, best of all, about the futility of existence seen through a depressive's eyes.

I wanted to scream at the end.

This was a wonderful book, my favourite of his that I have read so far. It certainly trumps Birdsong!

August 2009, 335 pages

"A fool's alphabet" by Sebastian Faulks

By the author of Birdsong.

By a strange coincidence I read this in the shadow of Vesuvius; the book starts "Vesuvius was erupting".

The book traces the first 41 years of the life of Pietro in an alphabet of places that are significant to him. These are not, as the rubric referred to in the book implies, places where Pietro has spent a night; they include A=Anzio where his father was injured which led to a meeting with his mother and M=Mons where his grandfather fought. Many of the places are also embedded in other places as reminiscences. However the demands of the form makes the narrative flicker backwards and forwards through time. It becomes difficult to work out key details about Pietro's life; sometimes this is enough to make you keep reading but at other times you are just plain confused. The overall impression (surely the author's intention) is that life is a random jumble of events, some of which have significance far beyond their apparent importance.

It does get you wondering what your biographical place alphabet would be. Here is a first attempt: Athens, Bedford, Cambridge, Downing (?), Eton, France, G, H, I, J, Kingston, L, Malvern, N, O, Paris, Q, Rome, S, T, U, V, Wootton, X, Y, Z. Some of these might need further work!

July 2009, 274 pages