The exquisitely banal A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It's taken me too long to get around to reading this but I'm so glad I did. Everybody and his dog seems to raving about it.

This is the first volume in a mammoth six book project by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. Hugely successful in Norway, the first three books have now been beautifully translated into English by Don Bartlett. 

This is autobiography laced with fiction. It's the story of Knausgaard's early years as a child, a teenager and a young man. It centres around his problematic relationship with his authoritarian, distant father, who, in his son's words, was 'an idiot'. His father, socially inept, friendless, divorced, eventually becomes a drunken slob and dies slumped in a chair. 

What distinguishes this 'novel' is that it challenges and, frankly, bores the reader with page after page of sheer banality. It's banality writ large. It's a forensic analysis of the unremarkably quotidian. There's nothing particularly special about Knausgaard's family, his school or his friends. He's a smart, good-looking kid, and the girls rather like him. He likes to party, get drunk and smoke. Gee.  

The book occasionally comes to life with delicious passages of social and political observation, but they are unfortunately too rare. He 'detests', 'despises', 'opposes' all sorts of important and trivial things - from the way people dress, to what they think, to their dumb political ideas.

Two thirds of the way through, after having fallen asleep yet again, I couldn't decide whether this book was the most boring thing I've ever read, or a sublime meditation on the magic of the mundane.

It's often just plain irritating. At one point the author and his brother suspect that their father may not actually be dead after all. It can't be taken seriously, as it's meant to be. Then there's the time shifts - there's always time shifts! - but they add nothing. There's no meaning enhancement going on.* 

And the brothers spend days cleaning the filthy, putrid, faeces-strewn house where their father finally expired. Why didn't they hire a professional cleaner FFS? 

There's no irony, no wit, no distance, no judgement, no critique. Knausgaard takes himself so fucking seriously.


In all the detail and precision I wanted someone, sometime, to go to the toilet, and even take a shower! Right at the end Knausgaard actually does both. Thank god.

But the longer you spend immersed in these 400 densely typeset pages the more you realise you are coming under their spell. And that Knausgaard's overriding preoccupation with death, decay and transience is sucking you in. And his portrait of Norway and its physical beauty - its landscapes, its cities and towns, its friendly people, its strong social life - all this is overpowering and resonant.

So a recommendation: if you start this journey, which you should, then stick with it. Yes, I will read the next five volumes.

* there are run-on commas galore too. Ugh!

Fiona McFarlane's The Night Guest

It takes a while to kick in but as this novel progresses it develops as a subtle and beautifully written portrait of old age, with its rhythms and unsettling disassociations. We see clearly what can only be the main character Ruth's early and painful descent into Alzheimer's.

But there's another powerful dimension to the story - it's quite a brilliantly paced psychological thriller. The sense of menace increases as Frida, the 'carer', is revealed as anything but. Ruth, sensitive, intelligent and not short of money, is a widow residing alone in a large family home by the sea. She becomes increasingly powerless and vulnerable, falling prey by the end to forces well beyond her comprehension and control.

The ending is tragic and ensures the novel as a whole reverberates with meaning. It will stay with you long after you've put it down.

McFarlane's debut novel has been shortlisted for this year's Stella Prize. It won't win it - Clare Wright's The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka ticks too many boxes - but its shortlisting is well deserved. 

New fiction from Text: Sebastian Hampson's The Train to Paris

He's a 20 year old student in Paris and already an annoying little moralist with a peck-peck judgementalism, and she, beautiful and in her mid-forties with a suspect past, just wants to 'have fun'. 

This tiresome and unoriginal story grinds on and on, becomes increasingly irritating, and eventually fizzes out. 

Thankfully.

(Normally Text does a lot better than this. Thankfully.)

Terry Eagleton's 'Culture and the Death of God'

If you're at all fascinated by religion and philosophy, and particularly the 'God debate' Terry Eagleton's latest book is a must read. 

It's a superbly written survey of Enlightenment, Idealist, Romantic, Modern and Postmodern thinkers, and its thesis is this: 'It is remarkable how long it took modernity to achieve an authentic atheism....Not believing in God is a far more arduous affair than is generally imagined. Whenever the Almighty seems safely dispatched, he is always liable to stage a reappearance in one disguise or another. Secular concepts contain so much religious baggage that religious faith is not easily consigned to a benighted past'.

You could safely categorise this book as yet another big boot up the arse to the hated Richard Dawkins and his ilk who he mercilessly attacked in his wonderful 2009 polemic Reason, Faith and Revolution. Dawkins and Sam Harris are 'old-fashioned nineteenth century rationalists who dismiss religious belief without grasping the kind of phenomenon that is is meant to be'. 

Eagleton also has fun with the unctuous Alain de Botton and his Religion for Atheists: 'A committed atheist like himself, de Botton argues, can still find religion 'sporadically interesting, useful and consoling', which makes it sound rather like rustling up a souffle when you are feeling low'.

But a word of warning: don't attempt this book unless you want to seriously engage on an academic level with its arguments. Eagleton inhabits a rather rarefied atmosphere with his God and his European philosophers. As is his usual style it could be called a huge exercise in name-dropping, and therefore tedious in the extreme. And in a real sense, apart from the final challenging chapter on Postmodernism, it could have been written fifty years ago.

Nevertheless, as a huge fan, I persevered, and can safely say it was well worth it.

The Snowden Files by Luke Harding. Just brilliant!

This just released book by award-winning Guardian journalist Luke Harding is absolutely riveting. 

It's a very comprehensive telling of the whole Edward Snowden affair from the very beginning to just a few weeks ago. It's as objective as it's possible to be, but it's obviously sympathetic to Snowden's motives, actions and his current plight and vulnerability - stuck in Russia with a very uncertain future.

There are many heroes in this fascinating story of our times. Not just Snowden, but the editors and journalists who risked so much, who dared to confront the powerful political and security establishments of the US and Britain and expose their manifest wrongdoing - Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, being a clear case in point. 

Harding weaves all the elements of this complex tale together seamlessly. In lucid prose he clarifies the technical and legal dimensions and the background political dramas as well. 

I can't recommend this book highly enough. 

Adrian McKinty's 'In the Morning I'll Be Gone'

Another brilliant effort from McKinty. This one has a force and clarity that is compelling. The plot, part simple mystery and part political thriller, has a pace and drive that is relentless. 

Detective Inspector Sean Duffy is a tough, smart, rebellious, warm and witty hero. And has courage in spades.

One of McKinty's strengths is his real ear for dialogue - he captures the grit and earthiness that bring these Irish characters so marvelously alive. But most importantly he thrusts the reader into the heart of 'The  Troubles', the violent political Catholic/Protestant upheaval of Northern Ireland in the 70's and 80's, and makes you feel its terror, both at street level and in the higher echelons of power.

He is historically and culturally literate and litters his narrative with insightful allusions to Irish history and myth. Like Ian Rankin he has his protagonist fill his lonely hours with great music, both rock and classical. And like Rebus, Duffy relishes a drink - whatever the hour or occasion. They are grounded and human and I like that a lot. 

I understand McKinty envisaged only a trilogy for Sean Duffy, and 'In the Morning I'll Be Gone' is the third (as well as being the best). I hope sincerely that he revisits that intention and gives us plenty more of this intriguing character and setting.

After all, for many of us baby boomers the Troubles were a vibrant  part of the soundtrack of our lives. It's a period rich in meaning and memory and McKinty does it justice. 

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life: A Must Read

Perhaps this long but hugely enjoyable novel should more properly have been called Death after Death. Characters, loved and unloved, are continually dying, usually in war. This is England in its darkest days. I doubt the London blitz has ever been rendered so dramatically and faithfully in fiction. 

Highly regarded British author Kate Atkinson not only tells a superb and compelling story, but playfully indulges in a fair bit of 'meta', the license fiction rather than history gives her. She explores a range of countless possibilities and contingencies through the vicissitudes of her characters' lives and times. The structure is time shifts, but also, controversially, plot shifts. 

It's a Zelig-like chameleon device but the question is does it let the author too easily off the hook? It's rather convenient not to have to tease out the dramatic consequences of rather serious events like death, rape and domestic violence. Ursula is raped at age 16, but was she really? She's still a virgin at age 23. Is her dreadful marriage and the awful violence she suffers at the hands of her husband real? I guess not. It's never referred to subsequently. Is her decade-long sojourn in Hitler's Germany (including marriage to a Nazi, giving birth to a child and taking German citizenship) 'real'? All these critical sequences turn out in the end to be just literary artifices. Similarly Ursula's frequent deaths along the way. And Teddy, her beloved brother: did he die in the war or didn't he?

As the novel unfolds we realise therefore that we don't know Ursula really much at all. We are being continually teased and our growing attachment to Ursula and others in her life continually undermined. We're thwarted at every turn by a literary device that serves little creative purpose. 

Of course it serves some purpose. Our fragile grip on life as we're swept up in events is just that - fragile. So many things could have gone in other ways. I get this. But it's not terribly profound or insightful, it seems to me. 

I would have preferred it if Atkinson remained faithful to her large and powerful narrative arc and refrained from structurally undermining it by short 'para-life' excursions. It's as if the impulse to tell domestic tales has overwhelmed her.

Because Ursula Dodd is a wonderful creation; full of life, intelligent, courageous and modern. She's impossible not to fall in love with. Her sister-in-law Izzie is no less delightful. The novel gives us an insightful portrait of women and their invariably awful lot through the 20th century. Though imprisoned in loveless marriages and stultifying social expectations, they are the very backbone of survival and progress.

However, in the end, I nod to the Guardian reviewer who wrote: 'Life After Life gives us a heroine whose fictional underpinning is permanently exposed, whose artificial status is never in doubt; and yet one who feels painfully, horribly real to us'.

(By the way, whoever wrote the blurb for this book should be taken out and shot. 'What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?' There is one reader who had no idea what the author was trying to do! It is absurd. And the book is rather poorly edited. Run-on commas infest virtually every page. Grrr)