i, Lucifer by Glen Duncan

How can I put this tactfully? If you are a Christian what is the nature of evil for you? Why does a powerful God permit the Holocaust? Well I hear the defence that it’s a consequence of us being given the freedom of choice. Hence the Devil and his hordes serve to tempt us away from the path of righteousness. But think on, in a world in which Good struggles with Evil we turn the terrorist and criminal into something less then human and that’s the path to genocide. Another defence is that God is not all powerful and needs us to make the world and so that love requires that we see the humanity in the paedophile and the holocaust stoker- condemn the sin not the sinner.

If at this stage you are reaching for your copy of 101 ways of dealing with Heretics i, Lucifer by Glen Duncan is not for you.(And if you thought you were getting a 60’s action thriller with Modesty Blaise kicking ass, are you in for a shock.) This book deals with the trials and tribulations of Lucifer as he gains the opportunity to experience human existence by living the life of a suicidal writer (whose soul is on hold in Purgatory) for a month. It’s told in a first person monologue with lots of flashbacks as he writes about the events in the Bible from his perspective for a screenplay.

The writing is funny, cheeky wicked and dark. Here Duncan manages to take a swipe at both the Christian Right and the PC brigade.

…Oh yes we got Mike downstairs. In fact now’s as a good time as any to tell you: if you are gay you go to Hell, Doesn’t matter what else you spend your time doing-painting the Sistine Chapel, for instant-knob jockey? Down you go( Lezzers are borderline; room for manoeuvres if they’ve done social work.) The entire masterpiece fuelled by the stiffened brush softened in the wrong pot. Another superb irony lost on His Lordship. Not a titter. Just consigned Michelangelo to my torturous care. Awful shame, really. (Had you going, didn’t I? Don’t for Heaven’s sake, take everything so seriously all the time. Heaven’s bulging with queer souls. Honestly.)

This is the Lucifer of Milton’s Paradise Lost (ok, yes I was an A’ Level nerd) consumed by Pride, charming, witty and the gift of the gab and yet in constant pain as doing evil hurts. So why does he do it? Well, if an Angel the deal is to sing and praise ** the Lord. If you want freedom of thought and action then you have to step into Evil as being outside of God’s Will as the only way to be “free”. The writing and story seduces to sup with the Devil (ok hands up those who know how Satin, Lucifer and the Devil differ myth-wise...and yes they do) even when we see him abusing his human body with sex and drugs and attempted rape. During the story is becomes clear that his version is not entirely true (yes I was shocked too) and that he is getting sucked into shaping, and being shaped by his Human host’s life. Nor is the offer by God as upfront as first suggested-what I hear God not playing a straight bat, I say it’s not cricket what.

Strangely, a soundtrack album with the same name as the novel was released as Glen Duncan lived in Clerkenwell with Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld (yes never heard of them either) while writing the novel so the two projects developed together. Even more off the wall is the proposed film version of the book, adapted by David Logan, starring Daniel Craig in the title role and Ewan McGregor as Declan Gunn. Given that the book is an interior monologue by Lucifer on flashback speed dial where we don’t meet the writer host except through the eyes of others, it’s going to be a case of enjoy the film but it ain’t the book!

So do I recommend it as a Book? Yes I do as an entertainingly wicked tongue in cheek comedy with some serious theological/philosophical overtones but only in the way that you can make serious theology out Charlie Brown (and they have!) Oh well, off to get the fire-proof clothing checked for the heretic lynch-mobs and do a bit niceness and love...just in case.

**Is it only me that see’s this account of Lucifer’s fall echoing Tolkien’s The Silmarillion?

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessle

So the novel is brilliant, rubbish or what?

This famous Sufi story sums up the conflict around Marisha Pessl début novel "Special Topics in Calamity Physics":

A judge in a village court had gone on vacation. Nasrudin was asked to be temporary judge for a day. Nasrudin sat on the Judge's chair with a serious face, gazing around the public and ordered the first case be brought-up for hearing.

"You are right," said Nasrudin after hearing one side.

"You are right," he said after hearing the other side.

"But both cannot be right," said a member of public sitting in the audience.

"You are right, too" said Nasrudin.

So is it juvenile rubbish written by a writer who has… a tin ear for prose. There is a page-by-page cascade of dreadful extended metaphors and distractingly inappropriate similes. Or is it the…most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. With its pirouettes and cartwheels, its tireless annotations and digressions, it has a similar whiz-kid eagerness to wow the reader.

Plot, Genre and what the F**k is going on

To see which way I sit, let’s start with Plot. The novel is mainly about the senior year of Blue Van Meer at a yuppie private school where her Father teaches political science. She is very bright and heading for being the top of the year on her way to Harvard. Hannah a film professor who bewitches the clever/social elite of the college befriends Blue. They are bitterly opposed to Blue’s presence and this is made plain in her treatment over the year but she is attracted to one of the pack and perhaps its mutual.

And there was Milton, sturdy and grim with a big, cushiony body like someone’s favorite reading chair in need of reupholstering…He was eighteen but looked thirty. His face , cluttered with brown eyes, curly black hair, a swollen mouth, had a curdled handsomeness to it, as if, incredibly, it wasn’t what it’d once been.

But another loves her and she can’t see past him being a jock and nice guy. So here we have the elements for High School satire.

But she and her Father have been on the road, teaching at colleagues and attending schools around America since her mother died when she was five. So part of the energy of the book is the hilarious scatter-gun comedy of them both on the road and the Father’s I-am-so-right about all things views on all things

“Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” Dad said, scratching his jaw thoughtfully, arranging the limp collar of his chambray shirt. “Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be as dull as Nebraska and that’s no one’s fault but your own. Well, if you feel it’s miles of cornfields, find something to believe in other that yourself, preferably a cause without the stench of hypocrisy, and then charge in to battle…

Combine the High School satire and the need to assess her Father and we have a Coming of Age as the story is written a year after as the Narrator (Blue) reviews the events of the past year and what her future will be. Those readers not comfortable with mixed genres also have to contend with the fact that the novel is also a Mystery. Its stated in the first few pages that Hannah dies, how and under what circumstances is revealed as the story unfolds. After the death about 2/3rds into the story takes an unexpected turn as it shows that, none of the events and main character were, as they seemed.

Does the genre mix work? Yes for me, as I liked the way that each of the genres undermine and reinvigorate each other. It’s like watching a film that combines “Heathers”(High School satire) “The Crying Game” (political intrigue) and “American Graffiti” ( growing up), which would be a mess in the wrong hands. But having a single narrator with Blue’s personality keeps this from unravelling but it may not be for you. As this commenter makes clear... A fizzy fusion of prep-school escapade, Gothic murder mystery and revolutionary intrigue (...) Initially entertaining, such gimmickry swiftly becomes tiresome and, rather than adding depth, detracts from a plot

Structure and Voice reflecting story purpose and shape

The structure of the novel reflects the over earnest academic nature of the narrator and her teenage angst in that its structured around core curriculum reading which means that each chapter is linked to famous, novel, play, political essay or poem such as Moby-Dick, Laughter in the Dark, Othello. Part of the humour of the novel is see what the possible resonance of the quoted title is with the actual events in the chapter. The end chapter, Final Exam sums up the book’s themes in a series of multi-choice questions and should not be read until the end of the book! The introduction like any introduction sets out what is to be discussed and for those that read it after finishing the novel it does but you miss it the first time round!

The narrator is a hot-house intellectual cultivated by her father and never really having the opportunities to have child-child friendships. This is shown in the novel by her excessive quote of references (not real life ones-give an author a break) and of quoting her father (these have the impact of being a commentary on the characters actions and showing her naïveté).This passage describes the silence used by Hannah.

And the wasn’t premeditated, condescending, or forced (see chapter9, “ Get Your Teen to Consider You thee ‘In’ Crowd.” Befriending Your Kids, Howards, 2000)

Obviously being able to simply was a skill supremely underestimated in the Western world. As Dad was found of saying all Winners were in possession of a strident voice, which was successfully producing a country that was insanely loud, so, loud most of the time, no actual meaning could be discerned-‘only nationwide white noise.’

Writing and characterisation: Good or Bad

Well I was carried along by writing tricks of the trade such as the the rich wordplay in which the character gets complexly carried away with metaphors and similes so whole passages come alive with the joy of language.

I had not foreseen the stiff , clapboard manner with which she’d greeted me, the barebones welcome, the whisper of a frown-as if I ‘d been wired for sound all night…


On Friday, March 26th, with the same innocence of the Trojans as they gathered around the strange wooden horse standing at the gate to their city in order to marvel at its craftsmanship, Hannah drove our yellow Rent-me truck into the dirt lot of Sunset Views Encampment and parked in Space 52.

Or as one critic put it...(H)er mesmeric tale, even at its most over-the-top, feels true to the operatic agonies of adolescence.

The three main characters, Blue, her father (Her father in many ways dominates as a character and it will be wonderful to see how they play him in the film surely under discussion) and Hannah stand out and several of the minor characters as well especially the “June Bugs” Blue and her fathers description of the women who get drawn in and dumped when they stop being amusing. The possible weakness is the Bluebloods, the college elite, it is not always clear why they act the way they act. In part this is the muddled perception of Blue and the manipulations Hannah. But they do tend to be used as plot devices and foils for some of the satire rather then being independent characters in their own right. Some concern has been expressed that Blue is not convincing: an intellectual that doesn’t read, getting to the top of the class based on intellectual efforts only etc but lighten up, it’s a satire not an anthropological study.

So what’s the judgement?

So, if you read it, get driven by the energy of the writing to the end and be amazed how much you have been tricked about what was really going on. Enjoy the characters and social satire. It is an impressive debut novel that is fun and funny but it bears no relationship with "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt so ignore that red herring. And ignore comments like...Her exhilarating synthesis of the classic and the modern, frivolity and fate -- Pnin meets The O.C. -- is a poetic act of will. Its good but please it ain’t the second coming or one night alone with your secret desire- you know who I mean.

Oh and of course you too are right.

Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan

Gerard Donovan is that cliché, an Irish writer with a poet’s sensibility. His 2003 debut novel was Schopenhauer's Telescope: trucks arrive with frighten, crying villagers, one man digs a hole, one watches. The result is a stunning and moving discussion that covers everything from the life of Genghis Khan to what exactly, is a hole.

In contrast, his recently published collection of short stories, Country of the Grand, uses musical and witty language to convey the lives of ordinary people in a changing Ireland. Morning swimmers, it’s about the loss of old school friends becoming strangers but it’s also about the compromises we make in marriage to keep the hope of love alive. A theme picked up in How long until when a man driving seeing a Life Assurance advert is prompted to ask, how long would you wait before you slept with someone so revealing marriage fault-lines. In other stories such as Shop lifting in the USA we discover the awful lie that the relationship is founded on or in Archaeologists see a relationship in its dying moments. In the Country of the Grand we follow, the events of one evening in the successful and empty live of a lawyer as he acts on the impulse of trying to find the landscape of his childhood. Many of the stories move from the thoughts and actions of the moment to a reflection of the past or as in Glass looking at the pain of a widow through the eyes of her accusing teenage son.

Gerard Donovan is clearly a writer worth reading if you like poetic prose and imaginative stories based on intelligent thought. But the collection of stories suffer as any collection of short stories does by being a random collection of writing enjoyed in the moment of the train journey but once collected together the signature of the writer becomes that much more obvious so less startling or stimulating.

Gerard Donovan use of language and imagery, hover between poems and prose,an good example of this is By Irish Nights . You circle over Ireland following road travellers over one night including those who won’t return as this extract illustrates.

...But those three children. A small breath of water makes a sea of the lungs and sinks the breath.

They found themselves after in languid palms that rested upright in the still water, and they hadn’t drowned. They found themselves in hands sometimes covered in swans that floated, shaped in rain drops that shook the surface of the sky where it rested in the water, in the hold of a father as he taught them to walk, in a mother’s patience as she fed them from spoons and dressed them for the morning. And then they found themselves at last, carved into the endless hearts that lost them, waking every night to sleep.

Its an interesting paradox of our time that in the panic that we can only cope with flash-card writing, short stories are in long decline as we prefer the narrative depth of novels. However, these facts may not be in contradiction, as short stories as poetry require good writing and good reading (close attention to language and structure) to work. Read this collection and decide if its bad writing or poor reading that shapes its future.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was an instant popular and critical success when it came out in 2000 being nominated for a raft of awards. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 and Hollywood has been sniffing around it ever since. Michael Chabon the author wrote the only known screenplay, which struggled to reduce a 635-page book to a 2-hour film. At one point, the cast was Toby Maguire (Peter in Spiderman) to play Sam Clay, Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta) to play Rosa Saks and Jude Law to play Joe Kavalier.

The difficulties for the film is what makes the book a joy as it starts in 1938 as Superman bursts on the scene and ends in 1954 as the Kefauver Senate hearings delivers the death blow to a declining comic book industry. A central theme is the roles of the Jews in the comic book industry: it explored the mythology of comic hero and its impact Joe and Sam own struggles and personal journeys form the stories of the Escapist which in turn shape their lives. Sam struggling to come to terms with being Gay and Joe trying to rescue his family stuck in an increasingly bleak Nazi run Prague. It also explores the historical rip off the artists and writers of the period. Superman’s creators did not come into the real money until the blockbuster Superman movies and a court case prised the money out of Hollywood’s coffers. Historical characters from the period from the comic industry and the movie, art and political world some in and out of the story. The Escapist also draws on Joe Kavalier’s training and experience of magic and Houdini type tricks and the impact this has on his life.

The writing is a tour deforce so that you hear, touch and smell the period. Each character has their own voice and even minor characters when they enter the story in a few paragraphs you have their back-story and motives seamlessly woven in so they become real characters. The point of view moves from character to character and no easy option or resolution is allowed as the story builds to the magic trick ending. Scenes are comic one minute and bitterly tragic the next as you join in the roller coaster of their lives. Yes I am going say it…if you only have the chance to read one book this year make it this one, you wont be disappointed.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea is a first novel by Mark Dunn who is in fact a successful writer of over 25 plays. The novel structure is epistolary, which means that the story unfolds via letters between the characters. This is supposed to add greater realism to the story and demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the device of an omniscient narrator. The approach was a popular 18th century device but mostly abandoned for most of the 19th and mid 20th century with the notable exceptions of Dracula by Bram Stoke and the Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. Recently it has a bit of a popular revivable with works such as The Boy Next Door (2002) by Meg Cabot and We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003) using the format.

Ella Minnow Pea is a slim 200-page book about Nollop, an isle off the coast of South Carolina, and home to Nevin Nollop, the supposed creator of the well-known pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The island folk are best imagined as a type of Amish or Plain People who are happy to be in a pre industrial idyll. Then one day tiles fall off Nevin Nollop’s statue knocking off a letter. This sets in train events in which that letter is forbidden in speech and writing on pain of punishment and eventual banishment.

The story is more then wordplay although the letters read aloud are a joy to hear. It also explores how an open accepting community gradually falls apart as neighbours turn on neighbour and as willing followers gradually also become victims. This is explored politically as free speech is lost and an increasingly power hungry elite take over and theologically as rival cults emerge and the emptiness of worshiping idols is shown. Alongside these important themes, we also see a love story unfold and a race to find a new pangram before all freedoms are lost that will reveal that Nevin Nollop’s is a fraud.

In the end, you will either like the book because of the fun wordplay and important themes or you dislike the format and the limited characterization. I am of the former camp and so strongly recommend it.

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami is on the surface a gritty hard boiled thriller set in the Kabuki-cho red-light district of Tokyo as the approaching New Year leaves near empty except for the human wreckage of the city. Jimji a young illegal sex tourist guide makes a good but shady living from taking westerners around the girlie bars, peep shows, hookers that allow foreigners.

He meets up with Frank who hires him for three days but from the start Jimji feels something is wrong and he starts to be sucked into an ever deepening nightmare that threatens his and his girl friend existence.

The story is told in the 1^st person from Jimji perspective and is based on clear fluid writing equal if not better then Haruki Murakami, which evokes the place and time so that you have a movie in your head. Not necessarily a good thing given some of things that happen.

Beneath the surface is a very different story which leads to conclusions and beginnings that can be misunderstood if psycho thriller is the readers’ sole expectation. We are instead being lead into mediation through the events affecting two desperate characters on what the Western and Japanese experience of loneliness is. The key passage for me is this one.

I remember the American making this particular confession, and the way his voice caught when he said “accept it”. Americans don’t talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to so many things. After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you will get through if you just hang in there. I don’t think I could stand the sort of loneliness Americans feel.

Reflect on what is being said here and you will enjoy a taut psychological thriller whose outcome makes perfect sense. Highly recommended

Uncle Petros and Golbach’s Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis

Uncle Petros and Golbach’s Conjecture was originally a best selling Greek novel and has now been published over 20 languages so don’t get switched off by the title and subject matter. Forget about it being about maths and in fact think of Moby Dick to place this book. It’s about obsession and pride in chasing the impossible dream. You understand the thrill and terror of chasing impossible dreams.

Right now let’s get the maths out of the way. Golbach’s Conjecture first stated in the 18th century suggests that:

Every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes.

But mathematicians lack proof that in all circumstance it would hold. For example think about Physics where if dealing with the very big or the very small ordinary scientific understanding ceases to work. So could this be the case in Mathematics? Yes over my head as well! But the author is a childhood mathematical genius who submitted original research at 15 before even starting his degree and also an acclaimed film maker and writer. So he both understands the mathematical issues and can write so that we understand and care.

We first meet Uncle Petros in the 1970’s through the eyes of the beloved favourite nephew as a teenager. Petros is dismissed as the family failure that supports him through the family business while he does nothing but read books and plays chess. He leaves his home only once a month to do the books of a charity founded by his father. The beloved favourite nephew is met by a wall of adult silence when he tried to find out what the anger of the family is about. A chance phone call and a subsequent letter lead him to discover that far from a failure Uncle Petros had been a professor of mathematics in the 20’s and 30’s at a prestigious German University. This makes him as obsessive as his Uncle as he struggles to discover the Truth of the family scandal.

He tries to become a mathematician to help him challenge and understand what had obsessed his Uncle. This causes huge family problems- this is a Greek family remember where honouring your family and Father is a top rule in life. He finally manages to get the story of his Uncles obsessive hunt out in the open but at a high personal cost to his own ambitions. It is clear that Uncle Petros is a genius who will never be known as his hopes are dashed in the 30’s by the publication of Kurt Godel’s Theorem. Yes more maths but not much so don’t leave. This solves the problem of completeness by showing that any theory of numbers will contain unprovable propositions. Alan During (him of how do we know a computer has human intelligence- asked before computers were developed- now that’s what being clever is about) then demonstrates that theorists have no idea which proposition is merely hard to prove and which are impossible to prove.

Hence, Uncle Petros has no way of knowing if spending all his life in trying solve the Golbach’s Conjecture is a possible but hard task or impossible task. He gives up, his dreams and hopes ended. The beloved nephew is finding the truth is released from his obsession and so escapes the fate of his Uncle but then realises that a psychological lie has taken place which he needs to lance but this has tragic consequences.

Uncle Petros and Golbach’s Conjecture is highly recommended Greek tragedy in less then 200 pages about theoretical maths and why love and life is about how you answer the Bette Davis Theorem:

Oh, don't let's ask for the moon. We've already got the stars.

The New York Trilogy: by Paul Auster

This is a series of subtle interlocking novellas set in New York published over 85 and 86: City of Glass, "Ghosts" and "Locked Room with the first set in the period, the 2nd in the 40’s and the last one in the 70’s. They use mystery conventions of the gumshoe detective (think Humphrey Bogart) but in a subversive way as an existentialist reflection on writing, and story creation and communication but at the pace of a thriller; it more Kafka then Chandler with haunting imagery and surreal coincidences. But it also has deep emotional and psychological depths.

To give you a flavour of the book, in the City of Glass the main Character is Daniel Quinn a writer who has abandoned writing except for mystery writing owing to the death of his wife and child. He is successful enough to only need to write one novel a year which he has just done and then he drifts. He is clearly depressed and only feels alive when he is the private eye of his novels. One night he receives a midnight phone call asking for a detective called Paul Auster( yes the real author is also a later character in the story) and after several rejections he decides to act as if were his private eye character. His clients are a child-man who is a survivor of a dreadful abuse by his father (he was deprived of language as part of an experiment in discovering the natural language of man before the fall of the Tower of Babel) and his wife a nurse who had married him so that he could leave the hospital. The father now elderly is being released from Mental hospital and they fear that the son will be killed and want protection.

The story then takes many twists and turns and ends with the author as character being criticised by a final narrator who may be one of the characters from the other stories for what happens to Daniel Quinn during the course of the story.

In the Locked Room all the characters are named after colours and it’s a classical stake-out story but is it? Or is it a reflection on the lives of characters once that have been created and written about?

The final story is of two friends who have drifted apart, one wanted to be a writer and is now a critic unable to create works of his own imagination. He discovers that his friend has disappeared leaving a wife and baby and a locked room of manuscripts. These turn out to be masterpieces of novels, plays, and poems far beyond his capability of writing. In preparing those for publishing he re-enters and re-evaluates his life long friendship and what it meant but at a cost as he faces a secret that tests him and his relationships to destruction.

Paul Auster’s draws on his own colourful work life in his struggle to become a writer so the stories have a grain of gritty realism. But they are interlinked by an interest in the impact of coincidences and lives lived in minimalist even ascetic ways against a background of a loss, failure and absent fathers and reflections on writing and storytelling. If you want a painless way into postmodernist metafiction then this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings

I chose two books at random this and Ghostwritten yet both have structures and plots that jumble time, place and character. Spooky or what!

In Weight of Numbers we weave up and down and across time and join and leave life’s entering into hope or its reality. Some characters we follow to the end others we leave. Characters collide in the sixties and their consequences are unravelled in the in the 90’s. African politics is interwoven with the first man on the Moon and Grange Hill stars. Real events and people are seen from the front or from the side with invented characters commenting on them. Each of the characters is engaging, and each of the stories is interesting - ranging from child kidnapping; people trafficking; the loneliness of homosexuality during the War; east African civil war etc.

The writing is beautiful and evokes images of Mozambique on a dusty afternoon or the radical squats of the 60’s. Most stories are told with perfect clarity, but you soon loose track to is who when. And miss reading it for a couple of days and you wander lost. Images stay with you and most sections are good but after a while you wonder what the point of the story is. Having read it I don’t know, unless the point is that the life we have now is not the life we dreamt of or the life we will end with.

Would I recommend it? A reluctant yes but try and read it in one sitting or read it twice: skim to get the characters clear then slowly to enjoy the story.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell was his debut novel in published in 1999 and so over shadowed by his second book Cloud Atlas that I had no idea that he had written an earlier book. We start the story in Japan in the aftermath of the cult subway poisoning and see these events from the perspective of the cult killer. We then move through nine disparate but interconnected tales exploring notions of community, coincidence, causality, catastrophe and fate.

Each episode is related in the first person, and set in a different international locale.

The gripping first story introduces Keisuke Tanaka, aka Quasar, a fanatical Japanese doomsday cultist who's on the lam in Okinawa after completing a successful gas attack in a Tokyo subway. The links between Quasar and the novel's next narrator, Satoru Sonada, a teenage jazz aficionado, are tenuous at first. Both are denizens of Tokyo; both tend toward nearly monomaniacal obsessiveness; both went to the same school (albeit at different times) and shared a common teacher, the crass Mr. Ikeda.

Other performers include a corrupt but (literally) haunted Hong Kong lawyer; an unnamed, time-battered Chinese tea-shop proprietress; a nomadic, disembodied intelligence on a voyage of self-discovery through Mongolia; a seductive and wily Russian art thief; a London-based musician, ghost-writer and ne'er-do-well; a brilliant but imperilled Irish physicist; and a loud-mouthed late-night radio-show host who unwittingly brushes with a global cyber-catastrophe.

As the plot progresses, however, the connections between narrators become more complex, richly imaginative and thematically suggestive. A pattern emerges in which chance events ripple around the world and through time to end in ways that one of the characters had always hoped for.

The prose is clear and the shift in genres acts as the motor to drive you through the story in the place of more traditional character or plot development.

I would highly recommend this book not as the herald of one yet to come but a good read in its own right.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Maurakami

Do you like your love stories happy, sad and bitter-true? Read on. If you like them sentimental and Mills and Boon is your genre of choice then best to leave now.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Maurakami opens with a Proust like moment as the Beatles tune is played in a German plane in 1987. We are taken back to the emotional triangle of his best friend (Kizuki) and his friends’ girl-friend (Kaoko) The first of many emotional triangles that Watanbe finds himself as the calm centre over the next five years.

He goes to a 2nd rate Tokyo private university in the student driven political riots and campus takeovers of the late 60’s where he makes friends with Nagasawa a secret reader of western classics and a serious womaniser. Or with his roommate, the storm trooper. Both teach him ways of living before disappearing from his life but perhaps not for ever. As the events of his friendship unfolds he meets and falls in love with a free speaking fellow student but this is not his only love so he gradually falls apart as the story moves to its bitter-truth ending

This at one level is the most accessible of Haruki Maurakami novels and the one that sold in millions in Japan making him a superstar. He fled for five years before going back. However it’s no Japanese Love Story which was a sentimental, romantic tearjerker film based upon Erich Segal's best-selling short novel of the same name.The mood is darker but lightened with humour and tenderness so you come to admire and love Watanbe honesty and painful path to adulthood. You also feel part of the ordinary life of 60’s Japan that lies beyond the stereotypes.

The prose has the poetry of the best Japanese writing but with the flow of the best western writing. I got to be a fan of his writing with the very different Dance Dance Dance which blurs genres, and writing conventions but I strongly recommend Norwegian Wood for anyone who like good writing for as Nagasawa says

if you only read the books that every one else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.