Month: October 2024

Sounds Like a Breakthrough….

I have not always got on with audiobooks. It’s not that I am sniffy about them, one of my favourite reviewers, Mike Finn, is an excellent advocate for the form, it’s just something about how I prefer to ‘consume’ and ‘digest’ books. For example, I listened with rapt attention to “The Handmaid’s Tale” and its sequel “The Testaments” by Margaret Atwood, spoken by Ann Dowd et al. Despite their huge profile, I hadn’t ‘read’ the books previously and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience….and then went and bought my own copies! Somehow, it didn’t feel like I’d done the work – the reading – and I guess I enjoy it. Imbibing fiction through my ears was not as complete, or satisfying (for me) as poring over the written word. However, I have persevered and in “Victory City” by Salman Rushdie, I can report something of an epiphany.

It may be that I inadvertently alighted on an excellent example, as the book won the AudioFile Earphones Award 2023, but the reader, Sid Sagar, is just perfect to my Anglo-Saxon ears and the 11 hours 49 minutes it takes to recount the epic saga was simply breathtaking at times.

The book relates the 247 years of life divinely granted to the heroine, Pampa Kampana and shares the rise and eventual fall of the city and empire of Bisnaga, the ‘Victory City’, from its mythical foundation, its kings and queens, lavish culture and the familiar human frailties that eventually erode its pre-eminence. Across her two centuries, Pampa Kampana enjoys a ringside seat for the creation of regional history, while her husbands, lovers and children arrive and depart, a necessary consequence of the main character’s accursed longevity.

The sheer scale of the author’s ambition in this tale is extraordinary and must surely endorse Salman Rushdie’s reputation as one of the finest storytellers of his generation. That he should transport a formerly unenlightened audio ‘reader’ so completely is also to be gratefully acknowledged!

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Cementing Early Promise

This first novel by Ian McEwan, first published in 1978, is short (just 152 pages), but in common with much of the author’s work, it packs a disproportionate punch and is deliberately disturbing. 

The story relates the experiences of four siblings, Jack (13) – the narrator, Julie (17), Sue (12) and Tom (6), who are forced to adapt when they find themselves orphaned by the unexpected deaths of their father and mother in fairly quick succession. Mindful that they needed to avoid the attention of the authorities, but ill-equipped to cope with the mundane expectations of the adult world, their respective struggles reflect the characters’ disparate ages and natures. Yet, their collectively grim existence is lightened only by the the macabre unfolding of the kids’ latent vulnerability and the attendant black humour, which staves off, at times, the fear threatening to engulf them all.

There are perhaps faint echoes of ‘Lord of the Flies’ (1954), but the reader’s unease stems in part from the worryingly plausible actions of the teenagers, drawn into a parentless world with no safeguards to deter some guileless decisions. What has subsequently become the trademark flourish of McEwan’s use of language is in evidence in this debut novel and marked him out as an author to watch. Some seventeen novels and six nominations for the Booker prize (to date) later, the author rarely disappoints.

Moreover, in this example, the titular ‘cement garden’ offers a metaphorical legacy of the main characters’ late father, a brutally minimalist approach designed to blanket the natural outside space, but also inadvertently incarcerating the children’s lives within.

Rating: 4 out of 5.