The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

David Mitchell’s doorstoppers seem to be the staple of book groups in recent years. I read The Cloud Atlas for one, and have now read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet for a second. Both books are sprawling and overwritten, funny and profound, dazzling in places and just plain confusing in others, but I haven’t regretted picking up either of them.

The Thousand Years of Jacob de Zoet follows the eponymous Zeeland clerk who has come to the Dutch concession port of Dejima in Japan to win his fortune. The port is a manmade island in Nagasaki bay; entry into Japan is strictly forbidden for most foreigners and the country itself is closed. Christianity is outlawed, even for visiting traders from Europe. In one of the books wonderful vignettes, the Dutch pretend that they’re celebrating New Year when in fact they’re having a Christmas meal:

It is understood by the ranked interpreters that ‘Dutch New Year’ on the Twenty-fifth Day of December coincides with the birth of Jesus Christ, but this is never acknowledged in case an ambitious spy one day accuses them of endorsing Christian worship. Christmas, Uzaemon has noticed, affects the Dutch in strange ways. They can become intolerably homesick, even abusive, merry and maudlin, often all at once. By the time Arie Grote brings up the plum pudding, Chief van Cleef, Deputy Fischer, Ouwehand, Baert and the youth Oost are somewhere between quite drunk and very drunk. Only the soberer Marinus, de Zoet and Twomey converse with any of the Japanese banqueters.

De Zoet and Uzaemon have become rivals in love for a beautiful Japanese lady, whereabouts by this point unknown. Still, that’s the last of Uzaemon’s worries. The toasts are about to begin:

Cupido the slave distributes a bottle to each of the two dozen diners... The Malay servant Philander follows, uncorking each bottle. Van Cleef stands and chimes a spoon against a glass until he has the table’s attention. “Those of you who honoured the Dutch New Year Banquet under Chiefs Hemmij and Snitker shall know of the Hydra-headed toast...” Arashiyama whispers to Uzaemon, “What’s a hydra?” Uzaemon knows but shrugs, unwilling to lose more of van Cleef’s sentences. “We make a toast, one by one,” says Goto Shinpachi, “and –” “– and get drunker and drunker, belches Sekita, “Minute by minute.” “...whereby our joint desires,” van Cleef sways, “Forge a – a – brighter future.” As custom dictates, each diner fills his neighbour’s glass.

Interpreter Uzaemon has already witnessed a rather gruesome lithotomy, and is feeling a little queasy before the wine: Mitchell drily points out:

Uzaemon notices how unwell he is feeling.

The toasts continue around the table:

Jacob de Zoet swirls his wine. “To all our loved ones, near or far.” The Dutchman happens to catch Uzaemon’s eye, and they both avert their gaze whilst the toast is chorused. The interpreter is still turning his napkin ring moodily when Goto clears his throat. “Ogawa-san?” Uzaemon looks up to find the entire company looking at him. “Pardon, gentlemen, the wine stole my tongue.” Goblin laughter sloshes around the room. The diners’ faces swell and recede. Lips do not correspond to blurred words. Uzaemon wonders, as consciousness drains away, Am I dying?

Luckily for him, not now...

The Satyricon by Petronius

I suppose it would be nice to say that this week’s choice was the product of a Classical education, but the prosaic truth is that I picked up The Satyricon after references to Trimalchio in The Great Gatsby (q.v.) and thought it would worth investigating further.

A quick précis of the plot: Encolpius, a former gladiator is travelling with Ascyltos, a former lover, and Giton, Ascyltos’s slave, whom Encolpius has a crush on. Their journey takes them through various ribald adventures, including the famous Cena Trimalchionis (Diner at Trimalchio’s). Trimalchio himself is a freedman now immensely rich. The epitome of crass wealth and moneyed vulgarity, he holds spectacular dinners, serving extravagant food and (allegedly) expensive wines:

At that moment glass winejars, carefully sealed with gypsum, were brought in. On their necks were fastened labels, with the inscription: ‘Farlernian wine of Opimian vintage. One hundred years old.’ As we scrutinized the labels, Trimalchio clapped his hands exclaimed: “So wine, sad to say, enjoys longer life than poor humans! So let us drink and be merry. Wine is life-enhancing. This is a genuine Opimian that I’m serving. Yesterday the wine I provided was not so good, though the company at dinner was much more respectable.” So we got started on the wine, taking the greatest pains to express our wonder at all the elegance.

Trimalchio disappears for a comfort break, and while he’s in the toilet, the rabble he’s invited round the supper wax lyrical about the warming effects of wine:

So Dama spoke up first. After demanding larger winecups, he said: “Daylight’s just non-existent. Turn round and it’s nightfall. So there’s no better order of the day than to get out of bed and to make straight for the dining-room. What a sharp spell of frosty weather we’ve had! Even after my bath I’ve hardly warmed up. But a hot drink’s as good as a topcoat. I’ve had a basinful, and I’m absolutely pissed. The wine’s gone to my head.”

The response is this nugget of wisdom from a man by the name of Seleucus:

“Myself, I don’t take a bath every day. Taking a bath is as bad as being sent to the cleaner’s; the water’s got teeth. My blood gets thinner every day. But once I get a jug of mead inside me, I can tell the cold to bugger off.”

Trimalchio returns from the khazi and the feast continues, or as the great man puts it himself:

“Out with the water, down with the wine!”

Quite...

Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernières

This is an absolute treat. I came by it after reading a review in the Graun that made reference to the Surrey Tyrol where the book is set, which was enough to send me off to the library for a copy. It’s set in that hilly part of the county between Godalming and Haslemere; not close enough to where I grew up to be my stamping ground proper, but near enough for me to recognise the terrain. That said, this book’s appeal is universal. Louis de Bernières has put the whole human comedy onto the pages in a series of interwoven short stories about the inhabitants of the village Notwithstanding.

In Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers, the titular Mrs Griffiths is a misanthropic widow who has a disdainful outlook on most things in life, especially young people and the gnarled old countryman Obadiah ‘Jack’ Oak, who hangs around Notwithstanding in a fug of six decades of neglected hygiene.

It’s coming up to Christmas and Mrs Griffiths is preparing to send her cards to the respectable folk in the village. However, a sense of emptiness has come into her life since her husband died, so she’s also decided that this year she will make mince pies and punch for the village carol singers, instead of turning off the lights and pretending she’s not in as she usually does:

Mrs Griffiths covers herself and her kitchen in dusting sugar, she deals with the frustration of pastry that sticks to the table and the rolling pin, she conquers the meanness that nearly prevents her from pouring a whole bottle of red wine into the punch, and then she waits, sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen, warmed by the rich smells of baking pastry and hot wine, and lemon, and rum.

The carol singers eventually appear, but at her garden gate she hears them discussing whether to bother singing at her door. Coming to the conclusion that she’s an old skinflint who will only hide when they start singing, they miss her out. Angry and frustrated to the point that she cries for the first time since she was a child, Mrs Griffiths starts on her Christmas cards instead. The job requires fortification:

She gets up from her chair and, without really thinking about it, eats a mince pie and takes a glass of punch. She had forgotten how good they can be, and she feels the punch igniting her insides. The sensuality of it shocks and seduces her, and she takes another glass... A rebellious whim creeps up on her. She glances around as if to check that she is truly alone in the house, and then she stands up and shouts, “Bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody.” She adds, “Bloody children, bloody bloody.” She attempts “bollocks” but merely embarrasses herself and tries “bugger” instead. She drinks more punch and says, “Bloody bugger.”

Sloshed on punch, Mrs Griffiths is spurred into uncharacteristic charity. She writes cards to everyone in the village, even to the people who own the pub and vote Labour. She boxes up the remaining mince pies and puts them on the doorstep of Obadiah Oak’s house. After that she comes home and completes what she’s started:

When she returns she finishes off the punch, and then heaves herself upstairs with the aid of the banisters. She is beginning to feel distinctly ill, and heads for her bed with the unconscious but unswerving instinct of a homing pigeon. She reminds herself to draw the curtains so that no one will be able to pry and spy, and then she undresses with difficulty, and throws her clothes on the floor with all the perverse but justified devilment of one who has been brought up not to, and has never tried it before. She extinguishes the light and crawls into bed, but every time that she closes her eyes she begins to feel seasick.

As well she might...

Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham

I’m not a regular reader of crime fiction and would probably not have strayed from my usual beat of Ian Rankin and Agatha Christie had Caroline Graham’s books not been dramatised as the highly successful series Midsomer Murders. Watching a repeat of an early episode prompted me to pick up the source material from the library.

The book starts with a missing person. Simone Hollingsworth, wife of a local businessman, disappears from their home in Fawcett Green. Her vanishing act causes her husband to lock himself in the house and hit the bottle, although he doesn’t go so far as to call the police and tell them his wife has gone. The vicar, dropping by to ask why she has missed bell ringing practice, notices that he’s in a bit of a state:

“Now Alan,” said the vicar, “If I may call you that?” His kindly glance was momentarily distracted by the sight of a splendid silver tray holding two cut-glass decanters and several bottles including a Jack Daniel’s, nearly full, and a Bushmills, half empty. There was no way, on his stipend, the vicar could afford either of these splendid beverages. He heaved himself upright again saying, “You look as if you could do with a drink...”

Obviously Hollingsworth thinks so to and very quickly reports come back that he’s living off microwave food and whiskey:

Later, further verification of Alan Hollingsworth’s debauched state was provided when a stream of bottles descended from his wheelie bin into the masticating maw of Causton Borough Council’s refuse lorry. Avis Jennings said it sounded as if someone was disposing of a greenhouse. The vicar, put in the picture by his spouse, thought of all that Jack Daniel’s consumed in lonely isolation and wondered if he should once more attempt to offer solace.

Eventually the local plod are asked to check on him, and more importantly, Simone. Hollingsworth opens the door to the village bobby:

“You’re plainly not very well, sir.” “I’m pissed, you stupid idiot...” Hollingsworth picked up the nearest bottle, which was uncapped, poured a stream of liquid into a smeary tumbler and sloshed it down.

It’s soon after this that Causton CID are involved and the book’s hero, Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby is on the scene. Though when they get to the house it’s a little too late for Hollingsworth:

A man was lying on a brightly coloured rug in front of an empty fireplace. Barnaby crossed quickly over and knelt beside him. Troy stood on the threshold, his fastidious nature affronted by the mixture of stale offensive odours about the place, not least of which came from the pool of urine beneath the recumbent figure. Troy noticed a tumbler lying on its side a short distance from the man’s right hand.

It’s clear to the DCI that foul play is afoot:

...Barnaby felt certain that Alan Hollingsworth had not succumbed to a stroke or heart attack. Or alcohol poisoning even though, according to Perrot, he’d been lowering gallons of the stuff for days.

When Polaroids of Simone appear showing that she’s been abducted, the plot thickens... It’s great stuff and frequently very funny, but having been spoiled by over a decade of John Nettles chewing scenery, I’m having trouble adjusting to Graham’s original creation.

King Of The City by Michael Moorcock

I find Moorcock an extremely frustrating writer, sometimes brilliant, but so ridiculously prolific that editing and quality control often go completely out of the window. His Pyat Quartet is wonderful, but I’ve tossed at least one of his books to one side after less than three pages, and his input into Hawkwind’s back catalogue has been distinctly shaky at times too.

King Of The City is typical of his work; not Moorcock at his best, but full of wonderful vignettes and turns of phrase, although it can get wearing. It’s probably meant to be that way, Dennis Dover, underground rock guitarist and intrepid photojournalist is such an intense character that being subjected to a relentless 400 page monologue is more trial by ordeal than reading. It is not without reward, however.

Dover starts the book suspended from a hot air balloon, taking paparazzi shots of the supposedly deceased zillionaire Sir John Barbican Begg, who is in a compromising position in a hammock with someone else’s wife. It’s the tabloid scoop of the year, well worth maxing out the last credit card to get.

I only had one crack at the shots. Drunk or sober, mad or sane, I only needed one. As we dropped lower over the convulsing soul mates, I clipped on the D-ring so that I could lean further out and take some side views, hoping that in their ecstasy they couldn’t hear the thump of batty-gangsta rap vibrating from my pilot’s pulsing boombox and amplified by our vast silver canopy, or catch a whiff of the roiling cushions of reefer smoke probably keeping us airborne. Not that you could do much about steering or speed in an FG-180. Plus the volume was busted on the blasta. Plus Captain Desmond Bastable, the pilot, had insisted on bringing two magnums of champagne for the trip as well as a pound of ganja so strong you could get cheerful just being in the same city with it. Also a bottle of Stolichnaya. I never drink on the job, it interferes with what I put up my nose, so Captain B had enjoyed both magnums and now lay spread eagled on the bottom of the basket chewing on his dreadlocks and cackling at his own smutty porkboy stories. Every so often he did something amusing with his burner. I didn’t care. I had three full rolls of FX-15+ with digital back-up and was on my fourth. The smoke pacified my mind. I relaxed so much I almost went completely over the side. I started to laugh. Captain Bastable found the vodka bottle. Life was never going to be better.

He’s got his shots, so now all he has to do is relax, get home safely and all his money worries are over:

I dropped our penultimate sandbag, and we rushed rapidly upward and back the way we’d come... I waved farewell to the Isles of Greed and sat down on the floor, zipped up my camera, sealed my film bag, flipped back at the digitals, secured my disc, lit a spliff, popped my last E, sipped the dregs of the Moët, ate my wholefood patty, threw the bottles over the side and saluted the soft emerging stars, wondering vaguely whether Captain Bastable would wake up in time to get us down somewhere near Kingston or if by tonight we’d be trying to bribe ourselves out of Havana with eight dollars, some seeds and stems, and old climbing harness and about six thousand yards of second-hand balloon silk.

Unfortunately, Dover comes home clutching his paparazzi shots to an icy reception:

I’m not the first conquering hero who returns home expecting a big welcome only to discover that in the meantime the social climate has gone a bit radical and the mates who sent him off with wild applause are not all that pleased to see him now. Embarrassed silence as Lawrence walks into the mess. I had left the bosom of my nation, or at least Marriages new Wharf, Wapping, one of the lads, popular with my peers, credit at every pub, a well-respected pro people were proud to know. I’d returned to feel like Herman Goering popping in at his local to down a last stein before going on to his trial at Nuremberg. “Well, mates, wish me luck.”

What an earth could have happened? While Dover has been snapping his scoop in the Cayman islands, there’s been a rather nasty road traffic accident in Paris:

...an over-tired driver did a few pills too many, had a few extra Scotches and decided to take the tunnel rather than the bridge.

In the post-Diana landscape, nobody wants to know him or what he’s seen. The celebrity snapper is now a social pariah and Dover is out of a job and frighteningly broke...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Like the Cold War in previous decades, the post 9/11 years have produced their own fiction dealing with its various themes and conflicts, of which The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a fine example.

Hamid’s second novel is written in the form of a long conversation between Changez, a young Pakistani man, educated in at University in the US and once employed in a high flying New York firm, and an unnamed American who gets increasingly jumpy as the evening goes on.

Scion of a once wealthy family in Lahore, Changez graduates from Princeton and is soon interviewed for prestigious valuation firm Underwood Samson. This is not before he and his fellow graduates set out for a holiday on the Greek Islands. Among their group is Erica, whom Changez falls for. She tells him that she is grieving for her boyfriend who died about a year before. He tells her about his life growing up in Lahore:

She ordered a beer; I did the same. “So what’s Pakistan like?” she asked. I told her Pakistan was many things, from seaside to desert to farmland stretched between rivers and canals; I told her that I had driven with my parents and my brother to China on the Karakoram Highway, passing along the bottoms of valleys higher than the tops of the Alps; I told her that alcohol was illegal for Muslims to buy and so I had a Christian bootlegger who delivered booze to my house in a Suzuki pickup.

Life soon takes over after their return to New York and Changez is scooped up into the high spending lifestyle of Underwood Samson. He is amazed that spending a large amount of company money on drink is not only permitted, it is actively encouraged:

But for me, at the age of twenty-two, this experience was a revelation. I could, if I desired, take my colleagues out for an after-work drink – an activity classified as “new hire cultivation” – and with impunity spend in an hour more than my father earned in a day! As you can imagine, we new hires availed ourselves of the opportunity to cultivate one another on a regular basis. I remember the first night we did so; we went to the bar at the Royalton, on the Forty-Fourth Street. Sherman came with us on this occasion and ordered a bottle of vintage champagne to celebrate our induction... Sherman left when the champagne was done, but he told us to charge our bill to Underwood Samson. We did so, staggering out into the street around midnight.

Changez is a great success in the firm, a number one valuator, and he also meets up with Erica again. He is introduced to her friends and family and is served wine at home with her parents. He takes a moment to explain the relationship between Pakistanis and drink to his unnamed companion at the table:

You seem puzzled by this – and not for the first time. Perhaps you misconstrue the significance of my beard, which, I should in any case make clear, I had not yet kept when I arrived in New York. In truth, many Pakistanis drink; alcohol’s illegality in our country has roughly the same effect as marijuana’s in yours. Moreover, not all of our drinkers are western-educated urbanites such as myself; our newspapers regularly carry accounts of villagers dying or going blind after consuming poor-quality moonshine. Indeed, in our poetry and folk songs intoxication occupies a recurring role as a facilitator of love and spiritual enlightenment. What? Is it not a sin? Yes, it certainly is – as so, for that matter, is coveting thy neighbor’s wife. I see you smile; we understand one another, then.

The attacks on September 11th 2001 leave Changez feeling increasingly alienated and distracted as the world around him takes arbitrary positions. Erica, who had a severe bout of mental illness when her boyfriend died, becomes unwell again and their relationship disintegrates. As the America slides into conflict with Afghanistan his emotions become increasingly polarised:

My reaction caught me by surprise; Afghanistan was Pakistan’s neighbour, our friend, and a fellow Muslim nation besides, and the sight of what I took to be the beginning of its invasion by your countrymen caused me to tremble with fury. I had to sit down to calm myself, and I remember polishing off a third of a bottle of whiskey before I was able to fall asleep.

A trip home at Christmas causes him to finally take sides and he leaves his firm soon afterwards, and comes back to Pakistan on a permanent basis. There he lectures at the local university, encouraging students to break with the west. One of his protégés has been involved in an outrage and as the evening draws to a close, the identity of his American companion and why he is there becomes apparent...

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

I was initially disappointed with The Lacuna, mainly because I just didn’t feel it measured up to her previous novel The Poisonwood Bible. In fairness, very few books I’ve read measure up to The Poisonwood Bible, and leafing through The Lacuna a second time for quotes, I came to appreciate its slightly more subtle tone.

Harrison Shephered starts life as the son of a Mexican mother and an American father who is a civil servant in the Hoover administration. The book starts in Isla Pixol, Mexico in the late 1920s where Harrison and his mother have come to live with her new beau, oil man Enrique.

The solitary Harrison spends his days floating in the sea with goggles on, burning his back to a crisp while watching the fishes. His mother Salomé ought to be worried about his long disappearances, but seems more interested in the contents of her glass:

He refused to come out of the sea all day, until the colors began to go dark. Luckily his mother and Enrique had enough to drink, sitting on the terrace with the men from America turning the air blue with their cigars, discussing the assassination of Obregón, wondering who would now stop the land reforms before the indios took everything. If not for so much mezcal and lime, his mother might have grown bored with the man-talk, and thought to wonder whether her son had drowned.

Far younger than Enrique, Salomé celebrates her birthday in style, just not the style that her new man and his guests are used to:

Afterward Salomé tried to get them all to cut a rug. She cranked up the Victrola and waved the mezcal bottle at the men, but they went to bed, leaving her fluttering around the parlor like a balloon of air, let go. It was her birthday, and not even her son to whom she had given life would cut a rug with her. “For God’s sake, William, you’re tedious,” she diagnosed. Nose in the books, you’re nothing but a cancelled stamp. Flutie, green apples, wet blanket, this is only a sample of the names that came to mind when Salomé was stewed to the hat. He did try to dance with her after that, but it was too late. She couldn’t hold herself up on her own stilts.

Nearly always juiced of a night, and fast falling out with Enrique, Salomé is quickly propelling herself and her son to disaster:

Everything about Salomé came from a jar or a bottle: first, the powder and perfume, the pomade for her marcel wave. Next, the headache, from a bottle of mezcal. Then the cure, from a bottle of Bellans Hot-Water-Relief. Maybe some other bottle gave her the flapper-dancing, crank-up-the-Victrola Twenty-Three Skidoo. Stashed under a table drape in her room, something to help her keep it up.

Well, she can’t keep it up forever and after getting the heave-ho from Enrique’s they eventually end up in Mexico City. There Harrison becomes cook to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Salomé dies in a car crash on the way to see Howard Hughes. Young Harrison, cast adrift in the world, becomes the part time secretary of the fugitive Lev Trotsky, and slides into the history books, complete with a run in with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and a walk on part by Richard Nixon...