Book report 5

Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

I’ve been waiting to read these books, which are the first two in a trilogy, for some time.  Mantel won the Booker Award for one or the other, and novels based on historical events are my favourite type of fiction. 

I was pretty confused throughout the first book as I thought the series was about Oliver Cromwell, and the story kept revolving around a Thomas Cromwell.  I assumed he was just backstory and we were working forward a few generations, but the books are actually about the wives of Henry VIII: a story in which I would probably have been more interested anyway, but perplexing when you’re waiting for an overthrow of the monarchy.  Thomas was one of Henry’s key advisors and was instrumental in helping him to devise ways to dispose of his wives.

Wolf Hall begins with Henry’s first wife, Katherine, and her daughter, the future Mary Queen of Scots, cooling their heels in separate castles as he negotiates with the Pope to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn.  What I didn’t realise was that Katherine was Henry’s brother, Arthur’s, widow, and he’d spent years wheedling with the Pope to be allowed to marry her in the first place as it was considered incest.

The eventual arrangement was that the marriage between Katherine and Arthur was never consummated due to Arthur’s early death, so she was free to marry Henry.  To then rid himself of Katherine, Henry argued that she and Arthur had consummated their marriage, so the 18 years and five children Henry shared with Katherine were illegitimate.  However, to avoid having been wrong in his previous suit, Henry’s people had to argue that Katherine had been unaware of her sexual activities with Arthur.  Maybe they had roofies back then or something. 

Katherine refused to go quietly and fought the decision to the end. What she didn’t realise was how lucky she was to be left mouldering in a remote castle; she couldn’t foresee the fate of Henry’s other wives.

Bring Up the Bodies begins with the same strong personality that drew Henry to Anne repulsing him and pushing him toward the docile Jane Seymour.  Of course, he’s only months into his marriage to Anne, which he’s fought eight long years and broken with the Catholic Church to affect.  Anne’s also failed to produce a live male heir, which is obviously her fault entirely.  Fortunately for Henry, Anne was a flirt who surrounded herself with male admirers, all of whom plus a few others went down with her in the adultery suit that nullified her marriage to Henry.  For good measure, and to avoid Henry looking the fool, she was also accused of witchcraft, having kept Henry under a spell for roughly a decade to achieve her position.

I’m not sure how Henry will get through two more wives in the last book, but I’ll be reading it as soon as it comes out.  Although I didn’t enjoy the books as much as I’d anticipated, and not just because we never got to Oliver, they still kept me up through naptime on several afternoons.  Mantel cleverly brings modern wordplay and humour into the dialogue without making it stilted, although I have no idea how realistic it is, and it’s just a fascinating story that can only be believed when you think about the fact that most of Henry’s subjects had no access to reliable information about what was happening at court.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Like any good NPR listener, I’m familiar with Sedaris through his frequent contributions to This American Life.  While I didn’t enjoy his book of animal fables, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, I always like his autobiographical stories on This American Life so expected to enjoy this book.  While I did enjoy the book, I was disappointed to find that at least 60% of the chapters had either been read aloud on This American Life or when we saw him perform in Melbourne last year.  I wanted to more humourous tales of his awkward upbringing as a gay Greek boy or his adventures with his partner, Hugh, in Paris!  Readers not already familiar with the stories in this book, though, are sure to enjoy it.

Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

I list Salman Rushdie as one of my top three favourite fiction writers, rounded out by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Vladimir Nabokov, all of whom make prose sound like poetry.  Like many of his readers, the fatwa issued for The Satanic Verses is what lead to my interest in his books, although I’m not sure he’d think the ten years spent in insolation were worth it (see his recent autobiographical account, Joseph Anton, his code name under protective custody).  Like anyone who actually read The Satanic Verses, I realised that he was just asking the same questions about religion that many of us ask rather than being a heretic, and that most of all he’s just a compelling writer of fantastic adult fairy tales.  And I don’t even typically enjoy fantasy. 

Given all of that, I’m going to blame my state of mind instead of his writing for not enjoying this particular book as much as some of his others.  I got a bit lost in the constant stream of characters with confusing names, and I found the idea of a travelling princess whose beauty was so astounding that entire populations came under her control a bit hard to swallow.

World War Z by Max Brooks

I read a positive review of this book in either Esquire or Vanity Fair, both of which I devour as soon as each new issue become available on the iPad, and was intrigued by the fact that the author is Mel Brooks’ and Anne Bancroft’s son.  Eric raced through it before we saw the Brad Pitt film, but I was still mired in The Enchantress of Florence and figured I’d better not let myself get distracted.  Fortunately for me, the book and the movie overlap about 5%.  I’m not sure why the production company even bothered buying the rights to the book, although I understand the original script did follow the book more closely but was significantly altered to build in more action and the potential for multiple sequels.  Sigh.

The book would have been difficult to make into anything but an artsy, conceptual film that wouldn’t appeal to their target market of bored pre-teens, though.  Each chapter is presented as an interview with someone who has played a role in fighting off the zombie apocalypse, from an officer aboard a nuclear submarine that dove deep to surface a year later to a mum who took control of security in her community.  Most interesting are the chapters that talk about how the disease spread and how the governments of different countries worked to contain the outbreak.  The dialogue was a bit overblown, but the myriad facets Brooks thought through and the creativity of how he presented it made the book worth reading. Plus, now I’m a bit more prepared for when zombies attack.

Dirt Music by Tim Winton

I was told back in Melbourne that I had to read this book whilst in Western Australia, and I do like to read books set in the places to which I travel.  I really enjoyed the first 60% of this book, which described life in a small fishing village an hour north of Perth.  While a different industry to mining, what we’ve seen recently made it easy to relate to a story about small-town people suddenly earning big incomes and the politics that can develop when that is based on finite resources. 

I was summarising the plot thus far to Eric, who then realised he’d read the book a few years ago and pronounced it a “chic book”.  I defensively ask how a fishing book could be a “chic book”, to which he responded that I should wait and see.  As usual, he was right.  Once the scene was set, the remainder of the book delved into why each character was a tortured soul with their own set of existential dilemmas.  I’m not even sure a group of people this screwed up could all exist in the same small town.  It was one of those books where you just want to shake the characters and tell them to stop making their own lives miserable.

Worst of all was the romantic element between two characters who basically shared a quick shag in a hotel room, another morning quickie at the house, and then a less sexy session where the primary female character burnt ticks out of the primary male character.  I just have a hard time believing that those limited interactions were sufficient to create a deep, binding love that could drive the remaining events in the book, which detail their contrived but predictable path to being together. 

That they would end up together was fairly obvious from early in the book, but the drama of the ending was still hard to swallow.  As I don’t recommend the book, I’ll tell you that the female lead in involved in a plane crash in a remote area where the male lead just happens to be kayaking at that exact moment.  He dives to the bottom of the ocean to extract her from the wreckage, and then she has to use her nursing skills to revive him back on the boat.  It’s too bad Australia doesn’t have Lifetime, because this would make a great made-for-TV movie.

His Illegal Self by Peter Carey

Alongside Tim Winton, Peter Carey is one of Australia’s most famous authors.  Similar to Dirt Music, I enjoyed the first 60% of Oscar and Lucinda a couple of years back, before the characters kept making their lives more difficult, so I picked this free book up in the caravan park office.  I read it in 24 hours, so it was obviously sufficiently well-written to keep my attention. 

It’s told from the perspective of a rich 7-year-old boy from New York City who is “accidentally” abducted by a former revolutionary and transported to a jungle commune in rural Queensland.  Carey cleverly avoids boring us with the logistics and mental leaps that facilitate the abduction by recounting most events from the boy’s perspective.  It wasn’t great literature, but it was at least entertaining, so I’ll leave the ending out of this one but will just say it’s a bit disappointing.