2011: And The Winner Is...

Well this one is a no brainer!

Forget your Murakamis and Ecos. I knew from the moment I started Jesse Ball's latest novel The Curfew that I had happened upon something very, very special. Ball had already been on my radar for a few years, being one of the few writers yet to disappoint. Samedi The Deafness was brilliant, whacked-out noir. The Way Through Doors was a gloriously surreal riff on identity and memory. Then there is his poetry and short prose (much of it collected in the wonderful compendium The Village on Horseback). But it is this, his third novel, that really cements his place in my mind as one of the great writers of our times. For those not yet to treat themselves to his work, Jesse Ball is Calvino, Kafka, Orwell, Stoppard and Chandler, rolled into one. Yes, he is that good. Don't be fooled, however, by all the name-checking. There is nothing even slightly derivative about his writing. Indeed, Jesse Ball has the most original voice in contemporary literature.

The Curfew is Ball's foray into the world of totalitarian dystopia; a world in which music has been banned, and the government causes its less favoured citizens to disappear. There is so much to love about this book - the absurdist humour of William's vocation; the beautiful tenderness of his and Molly's relationship; William's heartbreaking longing for his disappeared wife Louisa; the brilliant parallel world of the puppet show; Ball's willingness to eschew the happy ending for something far more profound and disturbing . Really, I could go on forever. Suffice to say that The Curfew is a masterstroke from the most exciting young writer at work today. One day it will be considered a classic but, for now, it'll have to sit patiently content in the knowledge that for me, and quite a few other people I know, it is the book of the year.

Check out my full review of Jesse Ball's The Curfew here.

2011: Secondary Stars and Other Satellites

Only a few days to go before I reveal my top books of 2011. However, as always, my brain is bursting with other things I want to put into lists so I hope you enjoy these Secondary Stars and Other Satellites, my everything else of 2011.

Best Books Not Written In 2011

1. The Tenant by Roland Topor. Topor's claustrophobic masterpiece continues to haunt me, months after I put it down. The greatest descent into madness that I have ever read.

2. The Brothers Ashkenazi by I. J. Singer. It was the first book I read this year and remains one of the best. This weighty tome by the lesser known Singer brother surpasses most of the Russian greats in terms of moral force and simple narrative verve. Staggering.

3. Rebellion by Joseph Roth. He may be famous for The Radetzky March, but it is this book that I would pick as Roth's greatest. As I said in my review, he had me at "crippled organ grinder".

4. Krakatit by Karel Capek. Stuff George Orwell, Jules Verne or Franz Kafka. If you want a writer who could predict the horrible future it was Karel Capek. This tale of a nuclear arms race predated the real thing by thirty years.

5. Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa. Yes, I'm putting a graphic novel on the lists. Dark, atmospheric and truly tragic, Pedrosa's riff on losing a child ranks amongst the best things I read this year.

Honourable Mentions: A Palace In the Old Village by Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Upright Piano player by David Abbott, The President by Miguel Angel Asturias, Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

Book Podcasts That Helped Me Survive the Long Drives and City Traffic

1. BBC Open Book. The folks at the Beeb have really lifted their game this year, putting out a great mix of interviews, book club sessions, reportage and, my favourite, the "Good Read" program, where two people of note come and recommend their favourite books before dissing the other's choice.

2. The Bookrageous Podcast. It might be rough around the edges, but these guys are clearly having a ball talking about books. Always a fantastic place to discover new titles. A podcast by book loving nerds for book loving nerds.

3. KCRW Bookworm. Michael Silverblat continues to dish up top quality interviews with today's top writers. Yes, his voice is still incredibly annoying, but nobody picks apart a book or author like this guy. No wonder they literally line up to come on his show.

4. New York Times Book Review Podcast. News, reviews, interviews and a bit of goss, the NYTBR is a great way to catch up on what's happening in book world each week.

Soundtrack To My Downtime

I don't only read or listen to podcasts, you know. Occasionally I also listen to music. And 2011 was a pretty good year in that regard. These records stood out for me, though there was a whole bunch more that I loved and probably could have included:

1. Alice Cooper - Welcome 2 My Nightmare. Oh guilty guilty pleasure! With Welcome 2 My Nightmare the God of schlock rock served up a filthy, fun and decidedly worthy follow-up to his classic album, awful album title notwithstanding.

2. Frenzal Rhomb - Smoko In The Pet Food Factory. On the subject of returns to form, Australia's punk prankster kings finally delivered the album they've been threatening to make for ages. By far their best offering since Meet The Family.

3. I Am The Avalache - Avalache United. Gritty, honest punk rock from a band I'd never heard of before but hope to be hearing a lot of in the future.

4. The Decline - Are You Going To Eat That? Newish kids on the Aussie punk block, this record is chock full of speedy, fun and socially aware tunes.

5. White Wives - Happeners. I've always hoped for a new Pixies album. This side project from two of the dudes from Anti Flag gave me the next best thing.

6. Janes Addiction - The Great Escape Artist. I'm probably the only person who liked this, but I doff my hat to Perry Farrel and Co for taking me back to my teen years. Funky, ethereal and stomping when needed.

7. Dead To Me - Moscow Penny Ante. A great, honest punk record from these bearers of The Clash's torch.

8. SixxAM - This Is Gonna Hurt. I liked the last Motley Crue album and, finally, I really like one of their side projects. So shoot me! Fantastic songs played brilliantly. It's like the last two decades never happened!

9. The Holy Mess - The Holy Mess. Kinda punk, kinda rock, totally awesome. Criminally overlooked.

10. Mixtapes - Maps and Companions. I have been loving this quirky collective for a couple of years now. A totally unique blend of folky acoustic balladry, chipper pop and down-and-dirty punk.

Feeding the Reader

Thought I'd add a new category this year, seeing as my other great love is stuffing my face. Sorry it's so Melbourne-centric but if you do live here take heed!

Favourite New Food Stop: Ren Dao Vegetarian in Glenhuntly Road, Elsternwick. I like meat. I hate killing animals. This seeming contradiction can best be addressed by visiting any number of those awesome Chinese places that do mock murdered carcass. Ren Dao is the newest kid on the block and, in a year that saw my former favourite (Vege Hut in Box Hill) go to the dogs, I'm glad to report that Ren Dao has swooped in and stolen the crown. Plus it's way closer to where I live. Double win.

Favourite Fancy Feed: Anada in Gertrude Street Fitzroy. Still the best Spanish joint in town, good vege options and KILLER everything else.

Food Discovery of the Year: Cholula Chipotle Hot Sauce. Makes the word a better place. Suitable for squirting on pretty much anything, including more Cholula Chipotle Hot Sauce.

Alright, so that's about it. Stay tuned over the next couple of days for the unveiling of my Best Books of 2011. Word on the street has it there's quite a tussle at the top end!

2011: The New Year's Aspiration Report Card

As 2010 drew to a close, I set myself five New Year's Aspirations that I thought might help in guiding me through the following twelve months. In June I revisited and was pleased to have been going quite well towards fulfilling them. Suffice to say I became rather complacent about the whole thing. Now, as we wave goodbye to 2011, it's time to see whether pride came before my fall. I'm ready to either pat myself on the back or flagellate myself with a stinging nettles while wearing rough hessian hosiery.

Read One Great Classic Per Month: Following a gung-ho first six months, I clearly slacked off in the classics department. I could try and fake it, having ripped through Struwwelpeter (which hardly even counts as an entire book), The Man Who Was Thursday, Molloy, The Quiet American, Peter Schlemiel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Great Crash 1929, but if I'm honest I have to admit than none of those could be considered amongst 'The Greats'. I offer only one book as the flimsiest of defences here: Ethics Of Our Fathers (with commentary), the greatest Jewish religious tract on the ethical relationship between humans. It technically doesn't get more classic than that. I went in hoping that it would never get too God-y. Alas, it did goshdarnit!

Read One Debut Novel Per Month: Big pat on the back in this department. Not only did I hit the mark, but I upped the ante to two or three. Some suffered from the obvious pitfalls of literary debuts, but others were really exciting. Of particular note was The Postmortal by Drew Magary, The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad, The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson, The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott, The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard and I Am Max Lamm by Raphael Brous. Plus I still have Eleanor Henderson's much-praised debut Ten Thousand Saints on my pile. A literary take on the early American punk scene? Hello Joey!!!

Read outside My Comfort Zone: A pretty decent effort, slightly exceeding my expectations. Non-fiction got a decent showing with The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee and The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson really standing out. Genre fiction was another big winner as I revisited my childhood obsession with crime fiction. As I mentioned in my last post, most of the 'new Stieg Larrsons' disappointed, but I did greatly enjoy The Man On The Balcony by Maj Sjowell and Per Wahloo as well as The Snowman by Jo Nesbo. Other 'uncomfortable' reading winners for me came from the world of graphic fiction (Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa), young adult fiction (The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) and drama (Cormac McCarthy's The Stonemason). Terry Pratchett's Snuff is still on the pile so, if it turns out that I like it, I might deign to consider myself well-rounded (as opposed to well round, which I have conceded long ago).

Read More, Buy Less: Absolute fail. Enough said.

Read One Series In Its Entirety: I didn't really progress beyond my mid-year tally of the Cities of The Plain trilogy and the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges. I still hope to knock over the last two novels in Samuel Beckett's classic Molloy series but, with only 11 days and at least 4 other books to go, I'm not holding my breath.

All in all a pretty good, although not exceptional, reading year for me. As the new year approaches I'm beginning to compile the next set of aspirations. Suggestions are always welcome. And don't hold back; I intend on setting the bar much higher. Yep, I'm challenging the reading gods to a game of Roshambo!

2011: The Shelf of Shame

Well, we've hit that time of year again, which means I feel compelled to rattle off my best, worst and pretty much any other category of books for the year. As always I'm starting with the dishonourable mentions or, as I like to call it, the Shelf of Shame. 2011 has been quite the doozy, full of unwarranted pomposity, false messiahs and fallen idols, and I'm not afraid to call shenanigans on all of them. Granted it's the sort of thing that might lose a person friends, but luckily I don't have any to begin with. So without further ado, I bring you 2011's Shelf of Shame.

Most Overrated Books of 2011

These books weren't necessarily terrible. A couple were actually quite good. But none came close to living up to the hype that was heaped upon them. Time to knock 'em down a few pegs:

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: The excitement began to build sometime around March for the release of this supposed masterwork by Japan's literary colossus. Such was the hysteria that Murakami was being touted in the bookies' top 5 for the Nobel. And then, come October it was upon us and, while it was eminently readable, it crumbled under the weight of expectation. Perhaps had it been released over time in its three volumes, as had ben the case in Japan, the narrative ellipses would have been less obvious, the repetition less tedious and the excitement sustained. Instead, it turned out the equivalent of being forced to read the first four Harry Potters in one go, complete with retellings of the same story for the first half of each new volume (and no, that's not a compliment).

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: Another book that just could not have hoped to live up to the hype, David Foster Wallace's last hurrah (not counting the shopping lists and other ephemera that cynical publishers have been churning out of late) was a good, sometimes brilliant but ultimately underdeveloped riff on the white collar world of tax. Two or three of the chapters stood amongst the best the tragic hipster ever penned, but other than that there was a lot of fat just begging to be trimmed. The literati had to wipe any number of bodily fluids from their patent leather shoes. I merely shrugged.

The Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer: Smoke and mirror wankerism by someone who ought to know better. I'm a massive Bruno Schulz fan and am generally quite fond of Foer but, wow, this was a gimmicky stunt that just didn't pay off. At least Foer answered the question he set out to ask: Can meaningful literature be created anew from the words of a pre-existing text? Put simply, no.

Snowdrops by A. D. Miller: How the hell did this mediocre thriller get shortlisted for the Booker? I'm still speechless.

More Hype but No Hurrah: Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, We The Animals by Justin Torres, Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson, The Boy In The Suitcase by Lene Kaaberol and Agnete Friis, The Wind-Up Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi (technically a 2010 book but still way over-hyped).

Biggest Disappointments of 2011

Again, not terrible by any standard, but hardly what I had hoped for.

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco: As I said in my review, The Prague Cemetery might as well have been written with me in mind. This re-imagining of the genesis of history's most ghastly literary hoax, The Protocols of The Elders Of Zion, started off well but quickly unravelled into something slightly too smart, too vitriolic and, ultimately too unconvincing to deliver on my expectations. Someone said to me recently that they thought Eco had lost the plot a while back. And while I'm not quite ready to give up on the portly one just yet, I have a sneaking suspicion it'll only be a matter of time.

The Angel Esmerelda by Don Delillo: I'd like to just put it down to a late-era flailing on Delillo's part, but these stories have been culled from his entire career, which leaves me to think that while he might have been the long-form prophet of American decline, brevity was never his strong suit. Delillo gets the singular distinction of producing one my most disappointing books two years running. Bravo!

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre: Granted it is not a new book, but thanks to the wonders of Hollywood, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had a bit of a renaissance this year. I had high hopes for this classic of the espionage genre, but coming to it for the first time in 2011 showed how badly it has dated. Now let's wait and see whether the wonders of CGI can make Gary Oldman better than Alec Guinness. As if.

More Books That Broke My Heart (For All The Wrong Reasons): Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward, The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman, The Messenger by Yannick Haenel, Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson, Gargling With Tar by Jochym Topol (a 2008 book, but one for which I had high hopes).

Most Annoying Trend of 2011

"The Next Stieg Larsson". Just because your ancestors were vikings and you have a name I can't pronounce, doesn't make you the next great crime writer. I get that it's all an opportunistic cash grab by publishers but, seriously folks, are book buyers so gullible that a simple sticker on every second hardboiled release will get them to empty their wallets? Heck, I didn't even like the first Stieg Larrson so what's with all the fuss? Buy a warm coat and be done with it! On the flipside, this rush to publish (and republish) Scandinavian crime fiction led me to discover the team of Maj Sjowell and Per Wahloo. Crackingly good stuff penned in the late 60s and 70s, making them the original (and easily best) Stieg Larsson.

Flat Out Worst Book of 2011

The Girl In The Polka Dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge: Some editors and publishers need to be slapped. Sure, Dame Beryl might have been working on this when she died but it was clearly still just a lump of clay with very little sculpting. It should never have seen the light of day. Bravo to the Booker crowd for distracting her fans with a Best of Beryl Prize, which allowed us all to overlook this tragic blight on an otherwise wonderful career.

Storming Home!

There's nothing like a holiday to salvage a slack reading year! After whinging about the unlikelihood of reaching one hundred and fifty books in 2011, I've really hit the ground running this month, knocking over twelve books in the first eleven days. And, no, I didn't resort to Roger Hargreaves. Right now I'm ploughing through book one hundred and forty, Erin Morgenstern's much lauded debut, The Night Circus. I was expecting to choke on saccharine, but so far it's utterly charming and a nice break from the drudgery of some of the other stuff I've read lately (once again, I'm looking at you Don Delillo).

I've also begun compiling my annual bevy of lists for your end-of-year entertainment. However, a brief glance over the one hundred and forty titles read thus far seems to suggest a paucity of 2011 books, which means it's going to pretty much be new(ish) releases from here on in. I don't want to have one of those "Books I'm Sure I Would Have Liked Had I Read It" awards again. So before the I explode one of those stupid streamer-filled poppers in someone's face, I'll be sure to get through Snuff by Terry Pratchett, Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson, The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano, The Postmortal by Drew Magary, Zone One by Colson Whitehead and City of Bohane by Kevin Barry.

Expect a flurry of posts from me towards the end of the month, but for now it's back to the circus.

Best Books of 2011: Eat Him If You Like by Jean Teule

Never have I laughed so hard at humankind's capacity for horrific depravity as I did while reading Jean Teule's deliciously vile novella Eat Him If You Like. Based on a true event that took place in the French village of Hautefaye during the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870s, it is a bold testament to the dangers (and idiocy) of the mob in desperate times. Deputy Mayor Alain de Money heads to the village fair for purely altruistic reasons: he wants to buy a heifer for his poor neighbour and find someone to repair another unfortunate friend's roof. Only a week from joining the French army, he is initially greeted by all around in the usual, friendly manner befitting a popular public figure. But the villagers are on edge, with the region ravaged by drought and its people beaten down by a constant flow of bad news from the front. When one of them believes he hears Alain utter a pro-Prussian comment, the Deputy Mayor is singled out as a traitor and set upon with increasing savageness by pretty much everyone in Hautefaye.

Each short chapter brings a new level of wanton violence to the unfortunate Alain; he is beaten, tortured, drawn, quartered and ultimately burnt alive in extremely graphic detail. Yet there's something vaguely Monty Pythonesque about the absurdity of the whole affair. It is hard not to laugh when they start referring to him as "Prussian" (I couldn't help think of the blasphemer scene in Life of Brian), or when they refuse to believe it is their popular Deputy Mayor, having beaten him to an unrecognisable pulp. Similarly I found myself choking with laughter and incredulity at the townsfolk's ability to twist every word Alain or his friends say in his defence to bolster their belief in his treason. God knows why, but I even chuckled when they spread his bubbling fat like butter on their stale bread.

Like Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel, one of my favourite books of last year, Eat Him If You Like is a savage rumination on collective guilt that will sit uncomfortably with you long after you put it down. And while it might be a ghastly little book, it's one that I'd recommend without hesitation. I just wouldn't read it over breakfast. Particularly if you're having toast.

Big (though not Best) Books of 2011: Murakami's 1Q84 and Eco's The Prague Cemetery

Ok, let me knock over two of the biggest books of the year with the shortest reviews you are likely to read of them.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
There's a certain sense of achievement one is supposed to feel upon finishing a thousand page book. I remember feeling it when I closed Infinite Jest, despite the frustratingly abrupt ending. Others have told me of a similar feeling with War and Peace. To us readers, the thousand page book is our everest. Why then did I feel nothing with Haruki Murakami's much-lauded new brick, 1Q84? I was so excited for it to come out, and was instantly enthralled by its pacy, off-kilter beginning. It had me hoping that the book would turn out to be the 12-inch megamix of my favourite Murakami novel, A Wild Sheep Chase. But as the dual storyline progressed - Aomame, the righteous assassin, executing wife-beating scum and Tengo, the hack wannabe novelist, roped into rewriting the mysterious novella (or perhaps revelation) of the 17-year-old daughter of a cult leader - I slowly began to feel a disconnect that I still cannot explain. There is something vaguely China Mieville-ish about the whole thing; the multi-layered contemplation of duality, the peculiar sci-fi tropes, even the echo of a Shakespearean romance. And yet I found it all lacking in substance. Murakami didn't really seem to be saying anything. Eight hundred pages in and I was praying for it to end. Indeed, if I didn't have my annoying book-finishing OCD, I'd have put it down. Reading 1Q84 is like eating forty litres of sorbet. But at least my wish sort of came true. 1Q84 was a wild sheep chase. Just not in the way I'd hoped!

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco is a literary force of nature. Nary a year goes by without something from him, be it a philosophical treatise or a complex work of literary theory. His novels are much fewer and far between, and so the arrival of each one is heralded as a major event amongst book nerds. When I first heard about The Prague Cemetery, fireworks exploded in my heart. A novel by one of the greatest historical fiction writers, revolving around an alleged event in my second homeland, about one of the darkest periods in the history of the Jewish people. It's like Eco was writing the thing just for me. The moment it arrived at my doorstep I plunged in head first, sans floaties, and was overcome by a sensation I'd never before associated with Eco; mirth. The first chapter of The Prague Cemetery is damn funny. Yes, so full of piss and vinegar is the narrator Simonini that I had to stop reading periodically just to catch my breath. No religious group comes out unscathed in those first few pages - Jews, Muslims, Freemasons, Jesuits, you name it. And for the next four-hundred pages he just doesn't let up. Simonini is a master forger, and as such is well-placed to be an important player in the raging conspiracy-mongering of late-Nineteenth century Europe. From minor frauds to the Dreyfus Affair and ultimately the greatest forgery of them all, The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, Eco posits Simonini as the scoundrel behind them all (though, in a poor plot decision, he gives Simonini a Hyde-like alter ego to operationalise the unrelenting vitriol). As always with Eco the writing is flawless and the research impeccable (pretty much everyone in the book bar Simonini and one or two others actually existed), but there is something unsettling about the whole undertaking which only becomes apparent as the novel progresses. What I first took to be hilarious soon became grating and then, borderline offensive. Although I realise it was done for a certain end, and it might have been redeemed in the final couple of chapters, there was an air of ambiguity about the anti-semitism which, if read by the uninformed reader, might add fuel to the conspiracies Eco is lampooning. Ultimately it is a dangerous gamble that might only have partially paid off.

The Bookworm, Exposed: My First Published Story

After one hundred and seventy-odd posts about other people's writing, I figure I might be forgiven for taking a brief moment to yap on about some writing of my own. Next week sees the release of the seventh volume of The Sleepers Almanac which, for those who don't know, is an always-exciting compendium of short stories by new and established writers, put out annually by Australia's finest independent publisher, Sleepers. The publication of the first six volumes were, to me, worthy of celebration, but I'm shouting this one from the rooftops because it contains my first piece of published fiction (as opposed to the reams of newspaper columns, reviews and academic articles), a story called "The Prisoner of Babel". I'm told the story is funny, though I thought it horrifying when writing it. I guess, as I told the editor, one cannot judge one's own children (actually I told her that I was willing to accept that my child is a little shit, even if I can't see it). Either way, hopefully, you'll like it because right about now I feel like I'm standing in front of the class naked!

The Sleepers Almanac is being launched at Bella Union Bar in Trades Hall (corner Lygon Street and Victoria Street, Carlton in Melbourne) at 6.30pm on Thursday December 1. Jessica Au will be hosting the show and I shall be doing a brief reading from my story, as will four of the other authors, Rosanna Stevens, Julie Koh, Eric Dando and Pierz Newton-John. If you're in Melbourne and can drag yourself away from the computer screen for an hour, please come down and help celebrate great Australian writing (hey, it'll be worth it just to find out if Pierz is related to Olivia and Eric is related to Evan). If you are unable to make it to the launch, make sure you pick up a copy of the Almanac at your favourite independent bookstore when you next stop in. There will also be a Sleepers Almanac iPhone App, but more on that as it comes to hand.

Premium Drafts: On Publishing Discarded Or Otherwise Unfinished Works

Legend has it that my favourite book of all time never got past the drafting stage. Truth is, there's no way to know how close to completion Franz Kafka's The Trial actually was but I suspect that it was much further down the track than Max Brod would have had us believe. Same goes for David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, irrespective of the hoo-ha that accompanied its release earlier this year. The only thing that monolith lacked was a good edit. Either way, at least both of those books can be read as entire works which is more than can be said for 2009's publishing sensation (read: fraud), The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov; a few cue cards, beautifully presented but ultimately inconsequential. Nabokov would have choked on a butterfly had he known his jumbled thoughts would see the light of day.

The publication of unfinished works is hardly new, but for some reason we seem to currently be drowning in a sea of offcuts. Even as I write, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Narrative of John Smith, written before the appearance of Sherlock Holmes, is hitting bookstore shelves worldwide. So what's with this deluge of (for the most part) dross? Perhaps it is a crass money-grabbing exercise by publishers who are reluctant to invest in new talent at a time when the book market is in such an extreme state of flux. Maybe demand is dictating supply; readers are simply desperate for words from the grave by authors they know and love. Or maybe it is a toast to a disappearing process; we read abandoned drafts because, thanks to the scourge of technology (and yes I appreciate the irony of bitching about it on a blog), 'drafts' as such are likely to become a thing of the past. Most likely it's a combination of all these. And more.

Having read a fair number of these 'newly discovered' drafts I can safely say that very few do anything to further the names of their authors. There is, however, one wonderful exception and, not surprisingly, it comes from one of the most exciting small publishing houses in business today. Without fanfare, Other Press has just put out Two Friends by Alberto Moravia. Regular readers would know how much I love Italy's post-war litgod. Yep, I'd read pretty much anything with his name on it. Thankfully, Two Friends is more than the preliminary scribblings of a great mind. Indeed, what makes it particularly enticing is that it was written (and abandoned) between my two favourite Moravia novels, The Conformist (1951) and Contempt (1954) and not only shows the development of his political thinking but does so three times over. You see, Two Friends isn't just one draft. It is three. Each with significant differences - in perspective, outcome and emphasis. The central question, however, is the same: to what extent will an individual compromise their personal morality to the greater cause? Sergio desperately wants to convince his rich friend Maurizio to join the Communist Party. Maurizio isn't the slightest bit interested but seizes the opportunity to play with Sergio's heart and test his conviction by offering an indecent proposal. He will join the party if, and only if, Sergio can convince his beautiful, loyal girlfriend to sleep with his him.

All three versions have their strengths, but it is the second that really shines. Taken on its own, it would have made a creditable addition to the Moravia canon. It is therefore intriguing to think that Moravia went on to discard many of its strongest aspects in draft three before ultimately giving up altogether. Reading this book in its entirety provides a prescient warning for budding authors: keep your drafts because sometimes it takes failed progress to appreciate what you already have. I hope other publishers now learn from Other Press's example and only publish unfinished works for which there are multiple drafts. Cobbling together a "final product" does the writer a disservice. There is, after all, a reason the thing was abandoned. However, exposing the entire process gives the reader a remarkable insight into the literary mind. Plus it doesn't hurt to be reminded that our heroes don't just click their fingers and have a masterpiece appear.

Microviews Vol. 14: Kaufman, Wilson, Tyszka

Somehow I read a couple of happy books. How unlike me. At least I rounded it off with a suitably morose offering. So here you go litnerds; moderate your mood with one of these:

The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman
Andrew Kaufman's geektastic debut All My Friends Are Superheroes is one of those books I like to dip back into whenever I need an emotional power-up. I first bought it on a whim. I'd never heard of the author or the book. But the title spoke to my costume wearing primary school self and to this day it remains one of the most charming, funny and heartwarming little books I've ever read. Now Kaufman is back with another novella that, while not quite as great as Superheroes, has nevertheless cemented his place on my DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) list. Kicking off with the weirdest bank robbery in history - the thief, dressed something like the Scarlet Pimpernel, demands everyone's most personal sentimental item - it follows each of the victims as increasingly absurd things begin to happen in their lives. Tattoos come to life, babies shit money and the protagonist's wife begins to shrink. Imperceptably at first, then faster until she becomes the size of a thimble. The Tiny Wife is a bit more straightforward than Superheroes (it is essentially a meditation on marital discord) but Kaufman still manages to splash enough moments of pure imaginative wonder throughout its eighty-five pages to make it another useful antidote to the daily doldrums.

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
The Family Fang had me at the binding. Not quite hardcover, not quite paperback, it is a format with which I can see myself becoming strangely obsessed. Then there's the cover artwork - a mix of Monty Python lettering and late-period Saramago cartoon characters. Win. So what about the book itself? The Family Fang is pretty much a primer on how to totally fuck up your kids. Camille and Caleb Fang are 'performance artists'; their art is the creation of chaos in everyday environments - elaborate, absurd practical jokes. Their kids, A (Annie) and B (Buster) are essential props in each stunt. The story jumps back and forth between descriptions of their various pranks, and the adult lives of the two kids. Annie has become an Academy Award nominated actress, prone to scandal and self-destruction. Buster is a flash-in-the-pan literary star, relegated to playing video games while he struggles with his next novel. The two are drawn back to the Fang world when their respective careers tank. But going home to mum and dad ends in disaster when Camille and Caleb disappear, suspected victims of a serial killer. Has the unthinkable truly happened or is this just another elaborate hoax, the great swansong of the Fang family? Like most comic novels, Wilson struggles to sustain the laughs, but he fills the void with large dollops of empathy and pathos. And while it doesn't quite deliver on what it first promises, The Family Fang was still one of the kindest-hearted, totally loopy books I've read this year.

The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka
There is a certain skill in being able to unnerve a reader. Ian McEwan has it down pat. So does Patrick McGrath. And then there's all those Eastern European creep-masters: Meyrink, Ungar, Walser et al. For the first half of The Sickness, I though Alberto Tyszka had joined the gang. Alas, this tale of cancer and stalking resolved so unsatisfactorily that I was left shaking my head at the waste of a brilliant setup. The Sickness is, above all else, a family tragedy; the story of a doctor who finds an aggressive brain tumour on his father's scan and struggles to find a way to break the news. Had the book just followed this line, it would have been perfectly beautiful, if very sad. However, Tyszka weaves a subplot of an obsessive hypochondriac patient, Ernesto Duran, who reacts angrily to Dr. Miranda's brush offs, until the doctor's secretary takes it upon herself to answer on his behalf. The email correspondence starts off genuinely discomforting. For a few moments it is even scary. But Tyszka does nothing with it - there is no confrontation, no crescendo. Duran just fades away. As did my interest in the ending, no matter how poignant it might objectively have been. So very, very disappointing.

Bravo as Barnes Bags A Booker!

Following in the footsteps of fellow consolation Booker Prize winners Ian McEwan (should've won for Enduring Love, won for Amsterdam) and John Banville (should've won for The Untouchable, won for The Sea), Julian Barnes has finally bagged a Booker for The Sense of An Ending. Sure, it's a better book than either of the other two consolation winners but still... Flaubert's Parrot anyone? England, England?

So after all my bitching I finally have to take my hat off to Dame Stella Rimington and her panel of judges. She got it right. And she played a masterful endgame around the very idea of worthy competition to ensure it happened. Oh well, it might not be how you play cricket, but at least it didn't sully the Booker brand.

Booker's Bucket of Blah: The Worst Shortlist In Living Memory

Well, the short list for the Man Booker Prize is out and I'm glad to say that I've read them all. Yes! I've escaped having to read Alan Hollinghurst again. Plus I get an entire month of reading for pleasure. All in all a happy ending. Except for the list. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Just to recap, the nominated titles are:

The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes
Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Pigeon English by Steven Kelman
Snowdrops by A. D. Miller

Yawn. No... Here comes the righteous anger! What on Earth were they thinking?

This has to be the most disappointing list ever. Sure, I already waxed lyrical about the unremarkable long list a month ago but this is ridiculous! J'Accuse Stella Rimington. Two substandard works pop up because they are essentially spy novels? Quelle suprise!?! Heck, there were only a few deserving novels on the long list (though, to be fair, I didn't read three of the contenders) and only one of those (Barnes) has landed up in the final running. Even worse, the two least deserving novels made it - so we might end up with the awful Pigeon English or the even worse Snowdrops taking it out. And before you accuse me of being a lit snob or try to defend the list as being courageously eclectic, I wasn't even gunning for the big names. I wanted Yvette Edwards to win. A Cupboard Full of Coats was one of the most thought-proking, moving works of fiction I've read in a long time. It has continued to haunt me since the moment I put it down.

For what it's worth I now hope Barnes wins. He has long deserved the prize and The Sense Of An Ending is a weighty addition to his body of work, even if it is only one hundred and sixty pages long. I also wouldn't be upset if Patrick De Witt won - there's something to be said for an enjoyable picaresque rescuing the Booker from its own arsehole. Unfortunately I don't expect that either of them will. Methinks this year's prize is reserved for Birch or Kelman. Please let it be Birch. I'd pick another tiger over a flying rat any day!

The Man Booker Prize Fallacious Form Guide Vol.2: Almost There

Ten down, three to go. Not sure I'll bother with the rest unless they make the shortlist; I want to read for pleasure again. But a promise is a promise, so here's the next lot of Booker longlisted novels for your betting edification:

The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers
It's been a while since Margaret Atwood last made an appearance on any Booker list, but she is well and truly here in spirit thanks to this middling sci-fi pastiche. Set in a near future that has been crippled by a worldwide bio-terrorism attack, it nods so furiously to canonical texts in the genre such as The Handmaid's Tale, Ballard's The Drought (and Running Wild for that matter) and even 12 Monkeys that I'm surprised it doesn't have whiplash. In this incarnation, the 'apocalyptic threat' is Maternal Death Syndrome (MDS), a man-made airborne disease that causes women to die during pregnancy, thereby making mince meat of our species' long term viability. Jessie Lamb, the 15 year old narrator, offers herself for martyrdom when a potential escape hatch for the human race opens up - the implanting of pre-MDA embryos into willing surrogates - much to the chagrin of her scientist Dad. Cue the metaphysical arm wrestle. Rogers throws up various moral conundrums about human and animal experimentation but dilutes it with some unremarkable parent/child drama and a vein of anti-patriarchal feminism so unsubtle it just seems clunky. Push aside the genetic soup and The Testament of Jessie Lamb never really rises above the level of homage to the greats.
Ladbrokes Odds: 16/1
Bookworm's Odds: 20/1

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman
God knows quite how Kelman has been plonked at number two on the bookie's list with this frustratingly twee take on the British knife crime epidemic. Little Harry Opuku is a precocious little scamp. Recently arrived from Ghana, he is obsessed with everything pop-culture, from sneakers to CSI. Especially CSI. So when one of his classmates is stabbed to death, he takes it upon himself to solve the crime with the help of his best friend Dean and a pair of crappy thrift store binoculars. What follows is an increasingly ominous descent into a violent world of teen gangs that he cannot appreciate until it's too late. Kelman's previous life as a successful script writer shines through - the dialogue is snappy, the voices authentically ghetto - but the book never felt more than an excessively padded-out short story. And did I mention there's a talking pigeon? Yeah, it's probably best that I don't. If this wins, it will be almost as great a travesty as the whole Vernon God Little debacle. Seriously team Booker, stop trying to be down with the kids.
Ladbrokes Odds: 5/1
Bookworm's Odds: 10/1

On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry
I suspect when his life's work is done, Sebastian Barry will have written one great family saga, with each novel counting only as a single chapter. On Canaan's Side sees the focus shift to Lilly Bere, sister of Willie Dunne (you may recall him being the hero of A Long Long Way), who is raking over the embers of her life in the wake of her grandson's death. Through her mournful haze, she recalls her early days in Ireland, her youthful love and subsequent marriage to Tadg Bere, and then the collapse of her dream when the newlyweds are forced to flee to America after Tadg gets mixed up in an IRA double cross. But the promised land proves only a temporary shelter, with Tadg being tracked down and murdered in a Chicago street. Lilly stays on, and through her subsequent highs and lows, hardships and relationships, Barry finds the perfect vehicle to explore not only the immigrant experience but the racial dynamics of mid-to-late 20th Century America. The novel spans seven decades, and it is to Barry's credit that he touches on the important historical events with a subtlety that prevents the book ever feeling like a high school history lesson. There's no reason On Canaan's Side couldn't be the one that finally nets Barry a Booker. As always, it is warm, understated and possesses a generosity of spirit that is extremely rare in contemporary literature. But then again, I thought the same about The Secret Scripture and A Long Long Way.
Ladbrokes Odds: 7/1
Bookworm's Odds: 5/1

Far To Go by Alison Pick
Pick shines a light on a fairly well-known, but under-explored (in literary fiction at least) aspect of the Second World War - the evacuation of Jewish children from occupied Czechoslovakia in what became known as the Kindertransport. Far To Go imagines a Jewish family forced to flee the Sudetenland when Chamberlain gives it over to Hitler in the name of "peace in our time", and then helplessly watch as the walls close around them in Prague. Their escape is thwarted when they are sold out by their well-meaning maid, but seize upon the opportunity to at least get little Pepik the hell out of dodge. Melodrama rules, stereotypes abound and, if you happen to have any knowledge of the Kindertransport already, annoyingly patronising factoids keep bubbling to the surface, all of which significantly lessen the impact of what might have been a very powerful novel. Nostalgic and only mildly engaging, this belongs on Oprah's Book Club, not the Booker Longlist.
Ladbrokes Odds: 14/1
Bookworm's Odds: 20/1

Don't forget, the shortlist is announced this Tuesday, so keep your eyes on the Booker Prize website

The Man Booker Prize Fallacious Form Guide Vol.1: The Halfway Mark

I've made no secret of my appalling record when it comes to betting on the Booker Prize. This year I have sworn not to fall down the same hole so, instead of placing any bets myself, I'm going to write a form guide to help you decide where best to lose your money. As always, I will read the entire long list (or as much as I can before the shortlist is announced) and use my spectacular oracular skills to gauge each book's likelihood of winning. In doing so I'll provide you with the briefest of reviews, as well as the current bookmaker's odds before throwing in my own (probably forged) two cents worth.

A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvette Edwards
Every year the folks over at Bookerland herald the arrival of 'the new Zadie Smith' and this year it's debut novelist Yvette Edwards's turn. Don't let the comparison turn you off though because there is much more to this than a plucky immigrant family saga. In fact, the only thing Edwards's book has in common with (now) Ol' Zadie is that it is set in Brick Lane. A Cupboard Full of Coats is a heartbreaking meditation on the crippling effects of family violence, its horrible trajectory and the resulting guilt that lives on far into the future. Jinx has long blamed herself for her mother's murder. She played a disastrous gambit to get the latter to leave her abusive husband Berris but it backfired and, rather than letting her go, he stabbed her to death. Years later, it is all brought back by the unexpected arrival of Berris's best friend, Lemon, at Jinx's door. As a girl Jinx loved Lemon. Lemon, however, loved her mother and was also doing his part to convince her to escape. Over the space of a couple of days Lemon and Jinx dance a delicate tango of guilt and recrimination, which culminates in some surprising perspective for both. In each other's revelations the two might find redemption but, as Edwards so crushingly points out, there is little solace. This is an urgent, relevant novel that deserves great recognition. It won't win the Booker, but it kind of deserves to.
Ladrokes Odds: 10/1
Bookworm's Odds: 4/1

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Edugyan's book swings with the Golden Age of jazz's signature patter but this ain't no New Orleans tale. Set at the dawn of World War 2 in Berlin and Paris, Half Blood Blues tells of an up-and-coming jazz band that catches the notice of Louis Armstrong thanks to its prodigious young trumpeter Hieronymus Falk. Timing, as they say, is everything, and the band, made up of American and Afro-German players is fated for disaster but it is not only circumstance that tears them apart. Edugyan uses a wonderfully obscure context to explore the limits of friendship in the face of naked ambition. We know from the outset that Falk is arrested and shipped off to Sachsenhausen, but it is not until well into the book that we realise the role our narrator, Sid, played in preventing his escape. The tone is suitable brooding and smokey, and the violent undercurrent is perfectly nuanced. The book ends a bit too neatly - it turns out Hiero survived and moved to Poland which conveniently provides Sid with a chance to ask for his forgiveness many years later - but it will certainly make you ponder just how far you would go for the perfect piece of art.
Ladbrokes Odds: 14/1
Bookworm's Odds: 20/1

The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes
I'm still peeved that Barnes didn't win for England, England or A History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters, but this sombre novella about youthful adulation and regret might just snare it for him. For those still whinging about its length, build a bridge made of old copies of Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach and get over it! Brevity is but a facade in this story of a middle-aged man reflecting on his most significant adolescent friendship. Tony Webster admired Adrian Finn when the latter first fell into his clique. Adrian was smart, serious... pretty much everything to which Tony aspired. But the friendship fell apart when Adrian shacked up with Tony's first love Veronica; needless to say Tony reacted with typical teenage spite, cut his losses and walked away. However, things didn't go all that well for the couple - Adrian committed suicide only a few years later. Now an ageing divorcee, Tony is forced to revisit the friendship when he receives a legal letter advising that he was left Adrian's diary in Veronica's mum's will. Huh? The mum? And what's worse, Veronica won't hand it over. Secrets beg to be divulged (and they are) and Tony risks crumbling under the weight of false nostalgia. The big revelation at the end (why do all the books on this list need bloody revelations???) is a little on the twee side, but viewed simply as a meditation on what it meant to be young in the 60's, and what it means to live your life in the past, The Sense Of An Ending is a winner.
Ladbrokes Odds: 6/1
Bookworm's Odds: 5/1

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
As promised, this is a riotous picaresque dotted with characters you'll love to hate, most of whom would not be out of place on Cormac McCarthy's rolling plains. The Sisters brothers are a pair of bounty hunters on a mission to reclaim a formula from some dumb schmuck that double crossed the local rich bad guy. Unfortunately for all involved, they grow something resembling a heart along the way and fall in with their marks in the hope of even greater riches. We all know what becomes of bounty hunters with heart... Folks get shot, doubles get crossed and it all becomes a bit predictable before ending in a most warm-hearted, familial manner. Thankfully there are plenty of laughs to balance out the wanton violence, usually at the expense of the poor horse Tub (both the laughs and the violence come to think of it). It's an odd addition to the long list for the Commonwealth's most prestigious literary prize but at least it provides a bit of fun for those of us used to trawling through snooty Hollinghurst yawnfests.
Ladbrokes Odds: 14/1
Bookworm's Odds: 7/1

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch
You can read my full review by clicking on the Microviews tab to your right. Suffice to say it's another story with a shipwreck and a tiger, and it's getting far more attention that it deserves.
Ladbrokes Odds:8/1
Bookworm's Odds: 10/1

Snowdrops by A.D. Miller
Again read my full review under Microviews. Here I need only point out that the wrong Andrew Miller got long listed. A travesty!
Ladbrokes Odds: 16/1
Bookworm's Odds: /1

Microviews Vol. 12: Saramago, Birch, Antunes

Cain by Jose Saramago

So remember how, a couple of years before he died, Saramago managed to right royally piss everyone off one last time while being interviewed about his most recent book? The epithets flew thick and fast: heretic, anti-semite, nasty pastie (ok, so I sort of made that last one up, but it was one of my favourites from my schoolyard days). Anyway, two years on and Cain is finally available in English so we who partook of the mudslinging can get a better feel for what all the fuss was about. And damnit if I don't find myself kind of regretting having said the things I did.

There is a beautifully poetic symmetry in the fact that the last book Portugal's great curmudgeon (and Nobel Laureate) wrote was a 'revised' take on the first book ever written - The Old Testament. And in true Saramago form, he didn't exactly use the exercise to make peace with his maker so much as pick a fight in advance of meeting him. Cain is a peculiar little book; playful, excoriating and chekily blasphemous. We all know the story of Cain and Abel, but Saramago uses the first murderer's subsequent immortality as a device to explore the nature of God's working throughout the remainder of the bible. Destined to wander from place to place, Cain becomes a minor character in all the important biblical episodes. Whether stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac (Cain has to step in because the angel God had sent had a mechanical wing malfunction), shacking up with and impregnating Lilith, ploughing Job's fields as his boss is subjected to ever more horrible tortures, standing beneath Mount Sinai when God unleashes his fury against the Golden Calf idolators or just helping Lot and his family out of Sodom and Gemorah, Cain bears witness to a Lord who is anything but benevolent and forgiving. Saramago makes no apologies for forcing his message down your throat - God is brutal, has no conscience and quite willingly destroys lives (even of those who show him absolute devotion). Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book, however, is not the argument but what lies beneath. Saramago seems not to question God's existence. He exists, the author suggests, but he is unworthy of your devotion.

To my mind, Saramago was one of the few laureates not to suffer a post-Nobel slump. Stylistically, this is him at his very best, playing with time and space such that the flashes between episodes seem natural (they occur in what amounts to parallel universes), allowing the book to come full circle and end with one of Genesis's earliest stories, that of Noah and the ark. As the water subsides, Saramago has Cain, the immortal wandering Jew, finally get his showdown with God. It is an incredible scene, one that justifies the Quantum Leap stylings, and containing a punchline so perfectly ingenious that you can't help but feel that, in the lifelong battle Saramago waged with God, when all was said and done, it was the writer who had the last laugh.

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

Last time a boy mucked around with a tiger and got caught up in a shipwreck, it landed Yann Martel a Booker, so it is little surprise that the punters are buzzing about Carol Birch's latest offering. Dig a little deeper and the similarities don't exactly fade into the background. The shipwreck itself (which involves a bunch of sailors and a couple of pigs, but no unlikely furry friends) is supposedly based on the sinking of the Essex but bears a much more striking resemblance to the facts in the classic British case of Dudley and Stephens, itself the inspiration for the naming of the tiger in Life of Pi. Richard Parker, the lawyers amongst you may recall, was the boy who was eaten by his mates, and for whose murder the defendants pleaded necessity. A hundred and fifty years on and the precedent still stands (though, in the actual case, they failed and were hanged).

But don't get too sucked in by the spin. Birch's book isn't a philosophical slice of dreamy magical realism but, rather, a harsh adventure-cum-survival tale on the high seas. It takes a while to get moving, as little Jaffy Brown falls under the sway of Jamrach, a Faginesque trader of exotic animals, and is sent on a ship in search of some mythical dragon (which I gather is a komodo). He and his expedition mates do manage to snare one in the jungles of who-knows-where, but the token crazy guy releases it mid-way through the voyage home, the thing goes beserk and, voila, the ship sinks. Up to there it is a pretty stock standard seafaring adventure. However, once the ship is down and the survivors are left to float aimlessly for months on two lifeboats, the novel takes a deeper, darker turn.

Birch's depiction of starvation, elemental batterings, interpersonal conflict and just sheer desperation are brilliantly evocative and spectacularly painful to behold. It is sad and hopeless, increasingly debased and ultimately apocalyptic. Fantastic! Unfortunately, however, it is not enough to lift Jamrach's Menagerie above the first one hundred pages' narrative slump. But at least it redeemed my obsessive compulsive need to finish the thing. A decent book, but don't go slapping down your hard earned bucks at the local betting agency just yet.

The Land At The End Of The World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Call me a cynic, but I find it difficult to view the republication of this Portuguese master's second novel as anything but cheap opportunism by a publisher keen to cash in on the rekindled fear of colonialism stirred up by the the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the very least it is a small act of political publishing protest aimed squarely in America's direction. Thankfully, The Land At The End Of The World is a staggering work of documentary fiction which well deserves to be introduced to a whole new generation of readers.

Based on the author's own experience as an army medic in Angola it is one of the bleakest anti-colonialism novels you are ever likely to encounter. Think Celine minus the virulent anti-Semitism, add an extra dollop of De Sade and you get the picture. Presented as an ongoing confession to a lover (or, quite possibly, a prostitute), it slides seamlessly between near pornographic fantasy and brutal descriptions of what the narrator has seen while on duty in "the arsehole of the world". Antunes stays on point throughout, keen to ram home his disdain for those anonymous politicians and generals who send young men off to die in the name of imperial expansion. The visceral descriptions of rotting corpses, war crimes and other indignities are unrelenting, as is the portrayal a man suffering the trauma of having witnessed (and perhaps perpetrated) these atrocities. The rationale behind publishing this of all Antunes's novels might be suspect, but its ongoing prescience and unadulterated power are most certainly not. Deeply disturbing, but a must read.

The Great Bard-stardisation: The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips

Hold back ye swords and spill not my blood for I speak only truth: I don't really care for Shakespeare (and can't simulate his style for shit). Having been forced to read every English teacher's favourite instrument of torture in high school, I never warmed to his purported mastery, despite the florid brilliance inherent in his wordplay. To be fair I've only read about four or five of the plays but I figure, as with any author, if I haven't liked him up to now, I ain't ever going to like him. Personal biases aside, however, I can appreciate the excitement that the discovery of any new play by the Bard might whip up. It has happened a few times in recent history, always leading to massive debate as to whether he actually wrote the darn thing. Now Arthur Phillips throws his hat in the ring, claiming to have discovered a hitherto unknown play, probably written in 1597, called The Tragedy of Arthur. Or at least that is the central conceit of his latest novel and superb act of literary ventriloquism of the same name.

The book is a hoax par excellence, structured in three equally beguiling parts. The first is simply a note from the publisher, a brilliant concoction that I suspect might actually fool some readers. It is but one of several small masterstrokes, such as the inclusion of both Phillips's and Shakespeare's previous works on the authorial bibliography page at the start of the book and a short biography of both writers at the end, that give the entire project an air of authenticity. Indeed, the whole thing is structured and presented in much the same way as any other Shakespeare play you might buy these days and, in that sense, is perfectly pitched to suck in the unsuspecting reader.

The second part of the book is Phillips's introduction, which the publisher has supposedly asked (well, forced) him to write. It is long, tortured and mostly compelling; the tale of how Phillips's father, a master forger, gave him this new play just before he died, swearing to the son that just this one time he was not pulling a swifty. It was, the father says, his way of making up for his absenteeism during Phillips's sad childhood. The introduction is the longest part of the novel, a two hundred and fifty page family memoir of disappointment and doubt, building to a crescendo of denial. As a stand-alone book, this would have been a touching read. In particular, the relationship between Phillips and his twin sister is beautifully told, making it all the more heartbreaking when they fall out over a mutual love (Phillips essentially steals and impregnates his sister's girlfriend). But it is the use to which Phillips puts this section that really makes it hit the mark. In a twist of pure genius, Phillips says that he does not believe the play is real, despite what all the Shakespeare scholars have said. Phillips claims he didn't want the thing published, and threatened to expose the hoax. But the folk at Random House shot back with threats to sue for loss of potential profit (and never publish any of his work again). They nut out a compromise - the publisher allows Phillips to mount his case against it but the play is going to be published as if it were genuine. It is a sly device on the part of Phillips. Spruiking its bona fides might have been funny, but it would also have made the joke more obvious. Here he gets to write a moving (albeit fictional) family memoir that invests the reader in the lie. It is far more convincing knowing that this highly-intelligent, well-regarded novelist does not believe in the product he is being forced to sell.

After almost three hundred pages comes Part Three, the piece de resistance: A complete five act play called The Tragedy of Arthur. Now I certainly do not lay claim to any sort of Shakespearean scholarship, but I bought it. The Tragedy of Arthur, stripped of the romanticism usually associated with the most-likely mythical king, is vintage Shakespearean tragedy. There is no round table. No Lancelot. And no Knights Who Say Ni. It is a bloody, treacherous tale of kings battling for the throne of a united England. Arthur (king of Britain) versus Mordred (king of the Picts), duking it out for a title, some land and the hand of Guenhera (who popular culture knows as Guinevere). Given my inability to grasp many of the allusions, or draw parallels between what was going on in the play and what had happened in Phillips's childhood, I was a little bored while reading the thing (sorry, Shakespeare does my head in), and believed myself not to have in any sense been captivated by the story. But then Act V came around with its litany of awful occurrences and I found myself shocked and emotionally drained. I'm not sure when it happened, but I was completely in its thrall. Heck, it may be homage and pastiche, but The Tragedy of Arthur is a damn good play. I'm hardly alone in thinking this. True Shakespeare aficionados have given this play the thumbs up and, apparently, there are moves to stage it. I, for one, would probably buy a ticket.

In keeping with the 'authentic style' of the book, Part Three comes complete with copious footnotes in which Phillips and a 'Shakespearean scholar' argue over various lines, the former to bolster his claim of its fraudulent character and the latter to dismiss Phillips and add his own typically earnest explanations. Recalling such notes in the plays I studied at school, I found it all quite hilarious yet tremendously effective.

Everything about this book, and the play contained within, is executed with style, flair and tongue firmly planted in cheek. It is a wonderful read, despite dragging a little in Part Two, and offers an experience we are otherwise denied: coming upon a Shakespeare play completely afresh, without the academic and theatrical baggage that inevitably attach to years of over-analysis. It is, I imagine, quite how the plays were experienced in the late 1500s.

Microviews Vol. 11 (The Debut Edition): Brous, Kay, Abbott

I Am Max Lamm by Raphael Brous
I should probably start with a disclaimer. Not only do I know Raphael Brous but I read the novel in manuscript form, offered a few thoughts and even scored a thanks in the acknowledgements for my efforts. Make of that what you will. It isn't going to change the fact that I'm still enough of an arsehole to view this exciting but flawed debut with some semblance of objectivity. So here goes. Max Lamm is the collected neuroses and failings of two thousand years of Jewish manhood (think Alex Portnoy with a bit more flair and a little less refrigerated liver). A once promising tennis prodigy, his career flies off the rails in spectacular fashion when his dalliance with a South American hooker goes viral on the internet. Escaping to London, he basks in anonymity until he kills a Pakistani teenager who tries to mug him, thereby starting the biggest race riot in a generation and forcing him to go into hiding under a barbeque in Hyde Park. And that's just the first couple of chapters. It only takes a few lines to realise that Brous is an important new voice on the literary scene. The writing is unrelentingly obsessive, with grand, sweeping riffs that shoot skywards only to do several backflips before soaring back down to where they started. It is an act of lyrical acrobatics that is just incredible to behold, but might have simply been a case of style over substance had Brous not backed it up with an encyclopaedic knowledge of culture (high and pop), current affairs, science and ridiculously obscure trivia. It doesn't always work - sometimes the riffs seem repetitive and there are a few mistaken 'facts' that an editor should have picked up (the one about the Jamie Bulger case really bugged me) - but for the most part it is easy to forgive Brous his stumbles because reading I Am Max Lamm is just so invigorating an experience. As the novel progresses and the hysteria mounts, Max finds himself taken in by Kelly Wesson, his goyishe mirror image, the spoilt rich American daughter of Republican royalty, also on a quest to escape her past. Luckily (or unluckily) for him, she does so through sex, although for her it seems more of an act of abasement and rebellion than anything remotely romantic. The sex scenes, in Brous's manic style, are quite tawdry and over the top though they never quite tick over to cheap porn territory. There are moments that might contend for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards but even they are so tongue in cheek (amongst other places) that it's hard not to read them as intended parody. It is just another example of Brous navigating his way through a pretty tricky narrative quagmire of his own making. Sometimes he does get bogged down - he could do with exorcising the ghost of Phillip Roth (c'mon, the guy ain't dead yet!) for risk of descending into pastiche and the ending is not quite convincing - but you have to keep reminding yourself that I Am Max Lamm is his first novel. Sure, it might not be the best book you're likely to read this year, but it is undoubtedly one of the most exciting. What more could you want from a debut?

Micka by Frances Kay
The 'evil child' has a serious pedigree in literary fiction and any book that explores the topic will inevitably draw comparisons with the two classics: The Bad Seed by William March and The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. Frances Kay dips in from a new angle, inspired methinks by the Jamie Bulger case (what is it with Bulger and debuts?). Rather than focusing on one evil kid, she conjures two and sets about exploring the genesis of each individually and the destructive interaction between them as a pair. Micka is the textbook psycho case - from a severely broken home, he is completely neglected by his drunken, inept mother and receives regular, vicious beatings from his brother Lee (probably one of the most repulsive characters I've ever read). Laurie is from the other side of the tracks, a spoilt semi-rich kid who is under-parented by two people more interested in one-upping the other as their marriage falls apart than looking out for their child's welfare. With their lives spiralling out of control, Micka and Laurie form a fast bond at school. And so the horror begins. The boys' story is told in their alternating voices, which makes for interesting insight into how each of them actually sees the other. Micka's sections are harrowing and make for incredibly difficult reading. At one stage he is savagely raped by Lee, a scene I have been unable to get out of my head since reading it. Laurie's parts are more mundane, though one gets the feeling that he is the more manipulative and unhinged one of the pair. Kay charts their descent into mutually dependant psychopathy quite convincingly, leaving the reader to feel like they are strapped onto a Scalextric track car careening towards a predictable end. Except the end is anything but predictable. Despite the parallels with the Bulger case, Kay wisely avoids the obvious and rounds the book out with an interesting, if slightly twee, twist. Micka is an engaging novel, well-worth a Sunday afternoon read, but highly unlikely to knock Nobel laureate Lessing off her perch.

The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott
Critics have been quick to liken David Abbott's debut to Ian McEwan and, to be fair, there are definite similarities. It certainly has the typical McEwan set-up: ordinary guy has life turned upside down by sudden, shocking incident. In this instance, retired advertising guru, Henry Cage is out on Westminster Bridge to welcome in the Millennium when he is pushed into the back of ex-con (and all-round psycho) Colin. The latter reacts violently, headbutting Cage in the face, and then follows it up with a campaign of low-level, but extremely creepy stalking. To this end, The Upright Piano Player is the novel Saturday should have been. But there is a lot more to the book than some hokey act of homage. Beneath the familiar facade is a surprisingly tender meditation on growing old, with a focus on the fractured connections within modern families. Discovering that his cheating ex-wife is dying of cancer, Henry tries to piece their relationship back together. The pair's gentle courtship dance is rendered beautifully, often drawing the reader to the edge of tears. He also reconnects with his estranged son (who sided with the mother) and begins to find new meaning in a grandson he never knew existed. The family drama is a perfect counterbalance to the constant threat of violence that permeates the story. The novel is not without its failings - there are some structural issues, especially with the death of the grandson at the outset wrong-footing the reader - but it is a powerful, assured and ultimately highly accomplished first effort. I'd like to say I can't wait to see what Abbott does next, but given he didn't write his debut until well into his seventies it might be wiser not to hold my breath.

2011: The Mid-Year Report

Well, we've reached the halfway mark. The winter solstice has flitted by, parting the clouds on the horizon to reveal the glowing spectre of the taxman, flaming head in one hand, rusty scythe in the other, set to pounce. Yep, it's that time of year.

Unfortunately, 2011 is turning out to be a bit of a slow one for me when it comes to reading. Between law work, lecturing, renovating a house and a bunch of personal crap with which I shan't bore you, I only managed to get through seventy five books so far. At least it's a round number. And thankfully, there have been a few really great reads amongst them. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

RESOLUTIONS REVISITED

You may recall that, at the end of last year, I made a few New Years Aspirations (a coward's non-committal version of resolutions). So let's see how I've fared:

Read One Great Classic Per Month. I started off well with The Brothers Ashkenazi, Anna Karenina and Joseph Roth's Rebellion but fell off the wagon pretty quickly. That is unless you count lesser known 'classics' like Roland Topor's The Tenant or short works by classic writers like Georges Perec's An Attempt At Exhausting A Place in Paris or Herman Melville's Bartleby The Scrivener. Oh, and I did read the collected fiction of Jorge Luis Borges (all eight or so books). And The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato. Not to mention The President by Miguel Angel Asturias. Come to think of it, I might have eschewed the great, capital "C" classics, but I've done pretty will on this one. Go me!

Read One Debut Novel Per Month. Seems I've stumbled across the finish line on this one, more by chance than design. I've read five debuts of varying quality in the past six months. Of particular note were Hannah Pittard's The Fates Will Find Their Way as well as Arnold Zable's 1991 debut, Jewels and Ashes. As for the debut everyone is buzzing about, Tea Obrecht's The Tiger's Wife... Well, I guess it was pretty good but in my humble opinion it wasn't deserving of the gushes (or The Orange Prize, though by now you'd know what I think of the Orange Prize in general).

Read Outside My Comfort Zone. While I didn't take the plunge into non-fictional waters, I did dabble in a bit of genre fiction (turns out crappy crime fiction can be a wonderful way to pass the hours) and finally had a go at reading graphic fiction. I'm not a total convert but the ones I read I enjoyed. Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa even made it to my Favourite Books So Far list (see below).

Read More, Buy Less. Technically a failure but I plead the defence of Sudden And Extraordinary Emergency (even if there have yet to be any superior court cases on the topic, it can be found in s. 9AI of the Crimes Act 1958 and I'm pegging my literary freedom on it... Just try to stop me!). Here's the thing, your Honour. I hadn't factored in the possibility of the Australian dollar surpassing parity. If I had let the opportunity pass me by I wouldn't have been able to survive. And so I bought. And bought. And bought. Until I could build a cubby house out of Amazon boxes.

Read One Series In its Entirety. Win. Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. In January. So there! (I do want to knock over another series or two, perhaps Sartre's trilogy or Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow series. Watch this space for a touch of over-achievement come the end of the year.)

All in all I'm pretty happy when it comes to fulfilling my aspirations. At least I haven't embarrassed myself too badly. Sure, I might have to up the Classics quotient in the next six months, but otherwise I think I'm on the right track.

Now to the inevitable lists:

MY TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2011 (SO FAR)
Although not all of these were published this year, here are the standouts (2011 books marked with asterisk):
The Brothers Ashkenazi by I.J. Singer
The Tenant by Roland Topor
The Curfew by Jesse Ball*
Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa
I Hate Martin Amis Et Al by Peter Barry*
Rebellion by Joseph Roth
Pure by Andrew Miller *
The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard*
The President by Miguel Angel Asturias

BOOKS ON MY BEDSIDE TABLE
So here's what I plan to be reading over the next couple of weeks:
Florence and Giles by John Harding
I Am Max Lamm by Raphael Brous (Which I've already read and enjoyed in manuscript form but I'm looking forward to see how it turned out post-editing etc)
The Land At The End Of The World by Antonio Lobo Antunes
The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
The Leg Of Lamb: Its Life And Works by Benjamin Peret

MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS FOR WHAT'S LEFT OF 2011
Of the books I know are being released, I'm most excited by Evilio Rosero's Good Offices, Cain by Jose Saramago, Roberto Bolano's supposed 'other masterpiece' The Third Reich and Juan Jose Saer's The Sixty Five Years of Washington. I've fallen a bit behind on future releases so I'm sure there are others that I would have included had I known about them. Projecting way into the future, I can't wait for the impenetrable Laszlo Krasznahorkai's newie Satantango which comes out in February 2012. But, well, that's eight months away so wait I must!

FAVOURITE SOUNDTRACK TO 2011
I know it came out in 2010, but I've just gotten onto The Arrivals' awesome album Volatile Molotov. Imagine Elvis Costello mating with a literature professor and fronting a gruff Midwestern punk band and you get the idea. Killer album. Something to listen to on your way to the nearest indie bookstore.

When High Praise Isn't Enough: The Curfew by Jesse Ball

Forget all the names you've seen in The New Yorker's Twenty Under Forty list. They were mere flights of hipster sycophancy. Tea who? Gary what? The most exciting, original and flat out incredible young writer at work today is Jesse Ball. Three novels and two collections of poetry (plus a volume of collected prose and poetry) into his career and he has yet to set a foot wrong. Admittedly, I'm not all that au fait with the poetic form, but by all accounts his poems are better than his novels and, if that is true, well step aside T. S. Elliot or Ezra Pound. I can speak only of his prose, but both the absurdist noir Samedi The Deafness, and the existential adventure The Way Through Doors rank among my favourite books of the modern era. It really comes down to one thing. Ball is the most unique voice to appear in ages. He has the unhinged imagination of the great surrealists (Alfred Jarry in particular springs to mind), the compelling narrative gusto of the master storytellers and a lyrical beauty that is just unfair in someone so young.

His latest novel, The Curfew, has just been released to minor fanfare but if there is any justice in this world it ought to propel him to literary stardom. Once again, Ball has created a familiar yet unsettling world and filled it with interesting, challenging characters. This one was always going to speak to me. William writes epitaphs, using a new pencil for each entry in his notebook. He used to be a violinist. But that was before the government banned music. And started causing its more pesky citizens to 'disappear'. William's wife Lousia vanishes one day, leaving him to care for their young, mute daughter Molly. It is a task he goes about in wistful earnest; the interactions between the two are heartbreaking yet still somehow affirming. The first part of the novel deals with William juggling his job with the realities of raising a daughter while coming to terms with his own grief. All is going swimmingly until he bumps into an old acquaintance who intimates that he knows what happened to Louisa. It is a moment of Dashiell Hammett gumshoe homage - "Meet me at place X at time Y" - a sly, humorous nod to his previous work that propels the story in an urgent, new direction. William leaves Molly in the care of his elderly neighbours, and breaks the citywide curfew in the hope of finally finding out what became of his wife. Although the book is perfectly charming up to this point, it isn't until Part Two, when Molly enters the neighbour's apartment, that Ball really comes into his own. Mr. Gibbons is a puppeteer of old, with a fully-functioning puppet theatre set up in his lounge room. While his wife potters about the place, Mr. Gibbons draws Molly into the reconstruction of each of his puppets, having her dictate in pencil (he doesn't understand sign language) who each of them might represent in her life. Part Three is brief and painful, recounting William's search for Lousia, and the shocking events of that night. Part Four is pure Ball - experimental yet mesmerising - a puppet show in prose form, acting out the story of William and Louisa's courtship, marriage and awful fate. It is a slice of meta-fiction that very quickly devolves into Kafkaesque horror. I don't want to spoil anything here but suffice it to say, Ball follows each suckerpunch with a kick to the nuts. He is uninterested in making the reader feel good or even comfortable. And that, dear bookworm, is a very good thing.

The Curfew is an important book, short (200-odd pages) but with considerable moral weight. It is both a beautiful meditation on parenthood, and a damning indictment on the ease with which a functioning state might slump into totalitarianism. With the help of a few decrepit marionettes, Ball has fashioned a thoroughly believable modern nightmare, dripping with beauty and specked with moments of true magic that only serve to increase its terrible effect. Indeed, it is the author who is the ultimate puppeteer and he jerks us around with ease. Like the two novels that came before it, The Curfew is an exercise in imaginative experimentation. And once again it works a treat, making Jesse Ball the only author not to ever have disappointed me. Like the great chroniclers that have come before him, Ball should be required reading for anyone and everyone trying to make sense of our times. He is playful, puzzling and packs serious intellectual heat. High praise? I dare say I still fail to do him justice.

Exhuming a Messiah: Pure by Andrew Miller

When Andrew Miller first appeared on the scene with his dazzling debut Ingenious Pain, I thought I'd found the new messiah. Immediately appointing myself high priest and chief proselytiser, I began shouting his name from every rooftop, stockpiling copies of the book to give out to my friends on their birthdays and clearing large spaces on my shelves to house what was destined to be his glorious ouevre. But then I made a a terrible mistake. I put down money - serious money - on him to win the Booker, which pretty much set the wheels of disappointment in motion for the next decade. There was no prize. There wasn't even a nomination. Sure, it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Premio Grinzane Cavour and, a few years later, the Dublin IMPAC but it was overlooked for the big one in favour of Arundhati Roy! And that was only the beginning.

Second-album slump hit Miller hard. His follow-up, Casanova In Love, was so damn awful that even had the Booker Consolation Committee wanted to give him a nod they just couldn't. I blamed myself and forgave him, then anxiously awaited number three. Oxygen, which did get shortlisted, was an alright novel, but lacked any of the imaginative flair of the debut. It was followed by an impostor (the other Andrew Miller wrote a rather quirky family memoir, The Earl of Petticoat Lane) and another slice of mediocrity - The Optimists. Then there was, One Morning Like A Bird. Yawn. Yet, for some strange reason (well, because Ingenious Pain remains one of my favourite novels of all time), Miller never lost his spot on my D.E.A.R. authors list. No matter what he puts out, I will drop everything and read it.

So now, almost fifteen years and four crap books from the initial revelation comes Pure, Miller's peculiar tale of digging up and relocating thousands of bodies from Paris's Les Innocents cemetery to make way for urban expansion. Obviously, the delicious irony is not lost on me; Miller's career might well be resurrected by a book about exhuming the dead. All the signs were good. Part of what made Ingenious Pain so great was the incredibly atmospheric evocation of pre-Revolution Russia and, in Pure, it seems Miller is intent on turning that same attention to pre-Revolutionary France. The guy has a serious knack for using history to great effect, both in how he portrays it and what contemporary parallels he can draw from it. Clearly the publishers thought they were onto a good thing. In this age of battling the e-book, Pure is a welcome relief, a stunning, embossed cloth hardcover that is as beautiful to touch as it is to gaze upon. But it's what lies between the covers that counts, and on that front I'm thrilled to say that Miller is back.

It is 1785 and Jean Baptiste Baratte, a young engineer from Normandy, is charged with the destruction of the cemetery and church at Les Halles. Holed up at a nearby guest house, he assembles a team of Belgian miners to dig up and cart away the bodies that are overflowing from the mass graves and stinking out the city. It is a stomach-churning task, taken on with scientific objectivity and pragmatic gusto. Hints of disease, infection, superstition and resentment creep in from all sides, made all the more ominous thanks to Miller's subtle, perfectly-pitched prose. In less deft hands, this novel would sink into a moribund abyss. Yet Miller maintains a lightness throughout, peppering the story with a varied and often hilariously grotesque cast of characters. There's Barratte's sidekick Lacouer, driven mad by the enormity of the undertaking; Colbert and Armand, the church's organist and priest, ministers both to an evaporated congregation; the Monnard family, with whom the engineer lives and whose daughter he briefly loves before she tries to kill him. And of course there's a few dastardly doctors and government types, ones you know will one day end up on the guillotine (if only because one of them is actually named Guillotin). Even Damiens, the executioner made famous in Foucault's Discipline and Punish, gets a look in.

Beyond the exhumation itself and the personal growth of Baratte, nothing much happens in Pure. It doesn't build to a narrative crescendo, though I suspect the final destruction of the church was meant to have a more cataclysmic feel about it. Unlike James Dyer in Ingenious Pain, Baratte is not the sort of character to whom one might feel any great attachment. And yet there is something about him and the book as a whole that completely captivated me. I read it in one sitting, late into the night. I still can't put my finger on what was lacking - I've never before had such a satisfying yet hollow reading experience - but niggling doubts aside, Pure is one of the best books I've read this year. All is forgiven, Mr. Miller. Welcome back old friend!