Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

I'm familiar with Orwell and think 1984 is brilliant, but I always get the feeling I wouldn't have liked Orwell himself and so wasn't sure whether I would like Homage to Catalonia. I am living in Spain at the moment though and wanted to know more about the Spanish Civil War.  I came away with a reasonable picture of the infighting between the unions, communists and anarchists at the time.

The book recounts Orwell's time on the front line in the Spanish Civil War, for the most part around Huesca. Orwell was in Spain for around 8 months and saw two rounds of service. He was invalided out of the army owing to a bullet wound to the neck and had to leave Spain in a hurry as the POUM, who he was fighting for, was named illegal by the Government (who were on the same side 'against fascism').

Overwhelmingly the feeling in the book is one of disorganisation, boredom, confusion and futility. He talks a lot about politics and socialism but doesn't match the ideas with reality. Throughout the book I was wondering what on earth he was doing there, essentially doing nothing much but being cold and hungry for months at a time.

There are no characters other than Orwell himself, he references others by name but never introduces the reader to them, we don't know or care about anyone else. We don't even know the name of the woman he calls 'my wife' or know what she is doing besides living in a hotel in Barcelona, patiently waiting for him to come back from the front. This all contributes to the thin feeling of Homage to Catalonia. It's hard to care about the extras in a film suffering and dying, it's much easier to care about the protagonists. Orwell doesn't bring the war down to a human level.

On the back cover of the book there is a quote from Antony Beevor 'An unrivalled picture of the rumours, suspicions and treachery of civil war'. The blurb says Orwell writes with 'bitter intensity'. I don't think I read the same book.

Olive Ketteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Olive Ketteridge is a beautiful, rich portrait of ordinary lives when they don't play out as we might have thought. It is full of people dealing with disappointments or the aftermath of small tragedies. A quiet sadness pervades the novel yet it's not depressing. I concentrates not on the disappointments or tragedies themselves but the resilience of people and the way in which they carry on with their lives. A lot of novels deal with happenings and then leave the characters to cope, but Strout addresses the coping and it is refreshingly human.

I think the book is trying to be a 'whole' novel, though it reads as if it were originally written as a collection of short stories. Olive Ketteridge is the main protagonist for most of the stories, though in some she is just mentioned in passing. It is more a portrait of lives circling around each other in a town than a portrait of Ketteridge. This expectation only comes from the title, it would feel very different if the expectation wasn't there, if there was a different title. I did like the short-story format, I'm a huge fan of the short story, but I thought this book didn't commit to either being a collection of stories or a flowing novel. Aside from that it is a full, well rounded portrait of lives and is well worth a read.

The Five People you Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom

I loved this, it is such a gorgeous, thoughtful, effortless novel. Albom presents both a beautiful version of a life and a beautiful version of heaven. Albom imagines that after death, everyone will meet five people, some of whom have affected our lives and others whose lives we have affected. Through these people we will come to understand and make peace with our lives, and so be released from the emotional baggage of our lives.

We meet Eddie on the day he dies and follow him through his five meetings. The meetings are interspersed with snapshots of some of Eddie's birthdays over the years. Albom's effortless writing gently unravels Eddie's rather ordinary but wonderful life. 

This is another book I've been reading in the library. I read it in two days, not only because the weekend was so wet, but because the novel is beautifully, quietly and heartwrenchingly human.

Peaches for Monseigneur le Curé, Joanne Harris

I read Blackberry wine a few years ago and really enjoyed it, I loved the the way taste and food is integral to the lives of the characters. Her novels, maybe unfairly, feel like guilty pleasures to me, which is why I chose this one to read on rainy afternoons in the library.

This is the latest in the series which started with Chocolat. We follow Vianne Rocher as she returns to the village of Lansquenet. A community of muslims have moved into the area and there are tensions between the locals and the new settlers. Rocher sets out to reconcile the two communities and uncover mysteries. It is very intriguing with a good storyline. The writing is a little annoying at times, featuring obvious musing and rhetorical questions from Rocher, and the protagonist herself can be a little too much, though this is picked up on by some of the other characters and is perhaps intentional, it certainly makes her a little more human. Good for rainy days.

Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson

Bryson makes a study of the English Language entertaining and easy to understand. He points out small histories and foibles in chapters with their own theme; accents and dialects, the difference between spelling and pronunciation and word games to name a few. The book is just in depth enough for a curious mind rather than a linguist, though it throws up question after question. Whether spelling follows pronunciation or vice versa seems to be a chicken and egg problem.

I find the same problems as I did with Neither Here nor There in that I find Bryson too negative and dismissive. Particularly here when he is talking about amateurs who dedicated years of their lives to investigating or cataloguing some part of English. They obviously made enough of an impact to be remembered & recognised in Bryson's book yet still he throws negative quips in their direction. The balance between readable informative writing and negativity tips in favour of the latter though, it's well worth a read.

Gateway, Frederik Pohl

Gateway is one of those great sci-fi novels that don't take you into another world, they show you another version of this one.

The protagonist is Robinette Broadhead, we meet him in a therapy session and the novel flicks between his therapy sessions in the present and his life to date. The novel artfully reveals the source of Robinette's trauma. It uses the same mechanic as Atwood's Oryx and Crake but Gateway is much more organic. We learn of Robinette's time on Gateway, a space station built by the Hechee, another much more advanced and long since disappeared life form. Humans have found the station and ships programmed for unknown destinations. Most people on Earth are poverty stricken and looking for ways to improve their lot. One of the ways they can do this is to go to Gateway and man the ships for unknown destinations, hoping firstly that they return and hoping to find other Hechee artifacts for which they will be paid well. It is a long drawn out game of russian roulette.

The novel is interspersed with posters, personal columns and bulletins from Gateway, efficiently offering insights and background to the atmosphere of the place and the lives of those in it. It was a pleasure to read, made more so by the fact Robinette isn't a perfect leading man, he is flawed and sometimes unlikeable.

Setting Free the Bears, John Irving

Setting Free the Bears was a struggle for me, and one I have given up on.

Itt is everything irritating about Irving's novels without the usual great story. It feels immature, the characters are a young man's idea of 'cool' young men, they are two dimensional and frankly irritating.

Part one was readable, part two quickly became political and silly. Not one for me. The copy I was reading had a great cover though.