Saturday 10 August 2013

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki



Anybody who has read Ruth Ozeki’s third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, would not say that it is a simple novel.  It has two strands – the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl called Nao, written just before the tsunami and earthquake that left thousands dead, and the life of the reader who discovers Nao’s diary, named Ruth, and based on Ozeki, in the Canadian wilderness.  There are various subplots – the letters of a Japanese kamikaze pilot, the life of a one hundred plus Zen nun, and missing animals, Japanese crows, and some stolen underwear.  And yet, at its heart, Ruth Ozeki’s novel is a simple novel.  It is, at its heart, a novel about a schoolgirl trying to find her place in the world, and a novelist trying to find the end to a story.



The principal strand – Nao’s diary – is a well-written evocation of a Japanese schoolgirl’s interior life.  Nao uses slang, emoticons, and switches with ease between English and Japanese, and who feels entirely adrift back in Japan after her formative years spent in America.  Sometimes Nao’s narration does tug on the heart-strings, and sometimes I feel Ozeki is deliberately dialling the emotion up to 11, but for the most part this is an entirely successful and moving account.  The secondary strand, that of the life of Ruth and her husband Oliver, is used for dual purposes: to allow Ozeki to elucidate on matters Nao’s narration cannot make entirely clear (for she is unaware of them) and to echo many of the novel’s deeper themes.  Her relationship with Nao’s words causes occasional friction with her husband, and provides a necessary counterbalance and gulp of fresh air for the reader from Nao’s narration, though even Ruth’s storyline is not avert to exaggerated emotions to tug at the reader’s heartstrings (a missing cat strand is particularly manipulative, emotionally speaking). 

A Tale for the Time Being is long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2013.  As it is such a complex and loaded novel, and one whose secrets might require a second reading to fully appreciate, it is quite possible that it will be shortlisted too.  Ozeki’s decision to engage with such weighty and profound themes – and I have barely touched upon them, and not even mentioned others (there are strands here about the reader/writer relationship, upon the power of fiction, Schrödinger's cat and the lifecycle of barnacles) – make it a novel worth reading twice. 

A Tale for the Time Being is not always successful however – its blend of Zen Buddhism and quantum mechanics, the 9/11 bombings and kamikaze pilots, and peculiars of Japanese culture, requires 163 footnotes and appendices to fully explain Ozeki’s novel.  But when she focuses on Nao’s life, and her fraught relationship with her suicidal father, or on Nao’s bullying at school, her prose truly comes to life and is thoroughly engaging.  For long stretches Ozeki’s novel is very good indeed.  I also suspect that you need to be a Zen Buddhist priest (as Ozeki is) to fully appreciate everything that is on display here.

Will it be shortlisted?

Quite possibly.  There is much to admire here, and Ozeki’s ambition surely needs some kind of recognition.  It might, however, be a little too quirky to gain that coveted shortlist place. 

Monday 5 August 2013

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan



The Irish economy crashed in 2008.  The Celtic Tiger was slain, and modern, cosmopolitan Ireland was left in ruins.  From the ashes of this once mighty land, from amid the smouldering, empty ghost towns around Dublin, there are whispers of song, of voices trying to be heard, of a people trying to say: we’re still alive in here, we still matter, please don’t forget about us.  Donal Ryan’s debut novel, The Spinning Heart, gives voice to those people.



Before being nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2013, Ryan’s novel had already gathered much critical attention.  As the first novel published by Doubleday Ireland, it seemed chosen to speak or a nation.  Then Waterstones, the UK book chain, selected it as one of their choice books of the year, after it had won the Bord Gáis Energy Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.  All of which must have been some major validation for Donal Ryan who admits he had been collecting the rejection slips from publishers for this and the novel he had written first (The Thing About December).  None of this I knew when I picked up The Spinning Heart a few months ago and read it.

The first point to note is that The Spinning Heart is a polyphonic novel.  Each of its 21 chapters is a monologue from a different character, some of them quite short, and their points of intersection slowly accumulate, creating an impressionistic vision of small town Ireland.  Ryan has admitted in interviews that his is a difficult novel to pitch. Say it’s a novel about recession and watch their eyes glaze over.  So you say it has kidnapping and murder in it, but James Patterson this is not.  So all you can say about it is that it is an ambitious, beguiling novel about people trying to survive when the world is crumbling and tumbling around their eyes.

Sometimes with polyphonic novels, each of the different voices can begin to sound similar, if not the same.  It is a relief to report that Ryan’s voices remain distinct, mostly due to his canny ear for dialect and turns of phrase – be they from Irish builders, a stranded Serbian immigrant, a single mother or a young child – and that his densely-packed sentences allows us to peer into the very souls of his characters.  There is something very special going on here.  Often with a debut novelist, you hear critics harping on about the ‘promise’ of this author – if he’s like this now, imagine how he’ll be in ten years, with experience and skill under his belt.  With Donal Ryan we have something more than that, we have talent fully formed, prose realised with such skill and beauty on the page it is tough to believe this is a debut (which it isn’t, as he had already finished the novel that will now be his second novel… but still, wow.)

The Spinning Heart, then, is a powerful, incendiary novel that displays immense power from its writer.  It is a novel that speaks to a contemporary problem with heart and grace, and though it offers no answers – there might perhaps be none, there certainly isn’t for the characters we meet here – it is a novel that will remain important for highlighting a moment of major international change through the eyes of some of those on the ground, caught up in the spinning heart of the crash.  Donal Ryan is most certainly a writer to watch.

Will it be short-listed?

Almost certainly, I feel.  Not that long ago a debut novelist won the Booker – Aravind Adiga with The White Tiger.  With The Spinning Heart it could happen again.

Man Booker Prize 2013: An Introduction

Regular readers of my blog will recall that this time last year I set myself the challenge of reading all the novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, reviewing them, and having a guess at who might be shortlisted and who might win.  The challenge was such a blast, I'm doing it again this year.

If you've read any of the press surrounding this year's prize, you'll know that it is quite a diverse and thrilling line-up.  It's hard to pick an over-riding theme to the choices.  We've a thriller, a romance, historical novels, contemporary-set novels, from a mere 100 pages to a 1,000.  Good lucking picking a winner from this lot, I say.

So who are the runners and riders.  Well, this is who:

  • Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire
  • NoViolet Bulawayo - We Need New Names
  • Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries
  • Jim Crace - Harvest
  • Eve Harris - The Marrying of Chain Kaufman
  • Richard House - The Kills
  • Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland
  • Alison MacLeod - Unexploded
  • Colum McCann - Transatlantic
  • Charlotte Mendelson - Almost English
  • Ruth Ozeki - A Tale for the Time Being
  • Donal Ryan - The Spinning Heart
  • Colm Toibin - The Testament of Mary
There are some familiar novels to previous Booker long and shortlists : Jim Crace and Colm Toibin.  There are some debutant novelists too: NoViolet Bulawayo, Eve Harris and Donal Ryan.  One of the books isn't even complete as a book: Richard House's The Kills has accompanying films on his website.

This year I'd read one of the novels before the longlist was announced: Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart, and I'd already felt it to be one of the strongest debuts I'd read in some time, so I'm glad to see it getting a nod.  Tash Aw, Colm Toibin and Eleanor Catton I've read before too, and are all excellent novelists.  I'm excited to be discovering these other, exciting voices. 

Over the next few weeks, leading up to the revealing of the shortlist on the 10 September, I shall endeavour to read and review each of these novels.  Join me if you like - I can guarantee it won't be a summer wasted.