18. Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela

For my father, Fuad Mustafa Aboulela (1928-2008) in tribute to his love for his family. And in memory of his cousin Hassan Awad Aboulela (1922-1962), whom he spoke of often. May Allah Almighty grant them mercy.

The eagle eyed readers amongst you will see that I have gone back to AB, after AC. Much to my dismay, I found this book sitting on the shelf, staring at me when I went to get more books. Clearly this one was preivously out on loan, so here I am again at AB. Oh well. It wasn’t much of a chore to be honest as this book was rather good. I didn’t realise that this book was good until a few pages in. I was on an underground train, on my way to work and had to stop reading to get off at my stop. Whilst I waited to get off the train, I suddenly realised that I had just been transported to another world through an image of Sudan. I had been sitting in a room in Sudan with sunlight streaming through the windows and onto yellow dusty walls, surrounded by exotic things. You can imagine the rude awakening I received when I suddenly I found myself in an underground station in London.

This book is based on the writer’s second cousin, a poet who became a quadriplegic through an accident. Although one of the protagonists is based on this cousin and his poems were used in the book, this is mostly a work of fiction. This is about a family and their battles within their relationships together, mostly focussing on Nur (the poet) and Soraya (his cousin who is betrothed to Nur), Hajjah (Nur’s mother) and Nabilah (who is also married to Hajjah’s husband) and above all of this is Mahmoud, the patriarch of the family (Nur’s father, Soraya’s uncle, Hajjah’s husand and Nabilah’s husband). It reminds me of The House of the Mosque, with its interweaving of characters and their relationships within a muslim family.

What makes this book enjoyable is how the author narrates a character’s thoughts and how well it is done. As a reader, you really are inside that person’s mind, you understand their thoughts, ambitions, hopes, and emotions. To do this well, each character has to be well thought-out with an idiosyncratic voice, and thses voices have to fit within the context of the story.

What I found interesting is that for a while, I thought that the writer was a man. It was only when I looked at the front cover half-way through the book that I discovered the writer was a woman (I try not to look at the cover or the blurb at the back as I try not to judge a book by its cover). This surprised me and I’m not entirely sure why that is, I think maybe because she writes men so well.

This is a bitter-sweet book about lost love and the love of literature. Similar to the House of the Mosque, the story is set in a country that is on the verge of change. Bringing in an element of historical fact somehow makes the story more real.

17. Pigs Foot by Carlos Acosta

Para Berta y tia Lucia, ambas victimas de la misma enfermedad. Y Para Charlotte y Aila

Well I did a Google translate and it says “For Berta and aunt (or girl) Lucia both victims of the same disease. And for Charlotte and Aila”. Now obviously as it’s Google Translate, I will take this dedication with a pinch of salt as Google Translate isn’t known for its accuracy. However, it does make me wonder and it sounds like a sad dedication. If this dedication is accurate, is it a disease as in an actual disease, or is Acosta using this word figuratively, in the way that greed or ignorance can be seen as a disease, for example?

Anyway, back to the book. This again was a refreshing read after the dry spell of Ackroyd’s books. Like the previous book, it is set in a different culture. This time, it takes place in Cuba and the fictional story is set against the real political backdrop of the time. The story opens with the narator immediately talking to the reader which is a powerful device to grab the reader’s attention. The narrator’s voice is very strong and he takes us through his ancestors’ story starting from the 1800s, just before slavery was abolished in Cuba.

However, as the story goes on, the narrator’s voice became weaker. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a strong and enjoyable story but the narrator gets a little weaker in comparison. I also enjoyed the story of his ancestors more than his own story. The story then becomes quite surreal but I won’t give it away. All in all, the book is an enjoyable read and makes the commute bearable.

What is interesting about this book is that the writer is the Carlos Acosta, the famous ballet dancer. It is always interesting (and a little annoying) when I encounter someone who excels at more than one thing. All I want is to write and publish a book. Maybe I should try ballet.

16. Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe

This is the second book that I’ve integrated from the Black writers section into the main section of fiction books. As I’ve said before, I am ambivalent about having a seperate section for Black writers. I understand the importance of celebrating and making Black writers easily accessible but the paradox is that by segregating the books, it makes them less accessible to the general population who aren’t necessarily looking for Black writers. This book is a classic. I’ve read it before and was very happy to see that this was the next book in my challenge, particularly after the dry books by Peter Ackroyd. This book tells a story about a well-known wrestler and warrior who lives in a village in West Africa. It is very vivid in its portrayals of tribal life in this village. This is a seminal book for Black writing as there weren’t many books by Black authors at the time. It also gives a rare insight into African traditions and a traditional way of life and how white men impinged upon these traditions.

The interesting thing that happened to me and proved to me that this was an important book, was when I was reading this on the train. An African man leant over to me and asked what I was reading. I told him and asked if he has read it to which he nodded. I told him that I’d read it before and it was really good to which he nodded again and leant back to his chair, signifying the end of the conversation. So there you go, you can’t get a better recommendation that a taciturn stranger who felt the need to break his vow of silence on public transport to ensure I was reading the right book.

15. Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd

For Giles Gordon

Yet another book from Peter Ackroyd and hopefully the last that I will need to read in this challenge. I’ll be honest with you (although I imagine you already got this), I have found his books quite tedious and difficult to finish. Unfortunately, this book didn’t differ. I found this book even more tiresome and difficult to get into. I think this is because I am getting to the end of my tether with reading his style.

Like the other books, this one contains different stories set in different times. A detective called Hawksmoor is taskwd with finding the mysterious murderer who has killed people in 6 churches in London. The other story is about Nicholas Dyer, who is an assistant to Christopher Wren and this is set in the eighteenth century. The 6 churches that the murders take place were actually designed by an architect called Hawksmoor in real life. Ackroyd has chosen to use the name Hawksmoor as the detective in modern day to make a kind of connection between the murders and the places. There are many post-modern devices at work here (Ackroyd mingles the two stories together, the mimicking of the crime novel genre, the pick and mix of language, formatting of text and styles of writing) but again, it left me feeling rather cold. What left me positively freezing is when I persevered with reading through this book, waiting for the story to begin (Hawksmoor doesn’t even come into the story until about half way through the book) to only be disappointed with the end. SPOILER ALERT (for those whom I haven’t put off) The murderer is never found out. After all that, there is no resolution, no satisfaction for my hard work of persevering!

Well I’m glad I finished it and can hopefully move onto authors whose surname begin with AD!

14. Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd

For Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson

So this is the third book I have read of Ackroyd and unfortunately, I didnt like it. Like the previous book, this story alternates between a story set in the modern day and a story set in the past. This novel is about a writer called Chatterton (surprise, surprise) who was a real person who lived in 1700s. He was, by all accounts, a child genius. When he was fifteen or sixteen, he wrote a series of poems in a medieval style and pretended that it was written by a monk. His style was so authentic that people believed that these poems were real. Spurred on by his success, he moved to London at the age of seventeen to become a writer. Unfortunately, he didn’t meet any success there and ended his own life at the age of eighteen.

Ackroyd tells the reader this before the story so we know who Chatterton is.There are multiple stories that occur within this book. I started writing about all the threads in this story but to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered. I think this is because I didn’t really enjoy the story and so I have been putting off writing this blog entry. As it’s been a while since I’ve read this book, I think this website explains the plot better than I could. I am sorry for doing this but really, I don’t think this blog post would benefit from me summarising every story I’ve read or will read. Instead, I can offer you these little nuggets (or lumps of mud if you’d prefer).

In Ackroyd’s other novel, English Music, the father of the main protagonist asked his son what the word ‘palimpest’ meant and then told him to look it up, so I did. The word means a document that has had its original text erased and written over but the original writing can still be seen. At the time, I didn’t really think much about this word but now I realise that this is the theme of Ackroyd’s writing. There are copies upon copies, forgeries occurring simultaneously: Charles (one of the main characters) thinks Chatterton is a forger, Harriet’s (Charles’ former employer) a forger, paintings at a gallery where Vivian (Charles’ wife) works are forgeries. The only person who tries to expose the forgery dies.

In the first chapters of Chatterton, Ackroyd intersects the story with mysterious lines of text that are italicised. I assumed that they were fragmented lines from Chatterton’s poems and I was right. He cleverly uses these lines as the last lines of the chapter before. This is to create mystery and to give Chatterton a voice and it did do, to a certain extent, but instead of making me more interested in the story, it made me more interested in the literary device.

Ackroyd once again switches from one story to another from the present day to the past, one being about the sitter for Chatterton’s death picture, and the other about Chatterton’s last days alive. Like Ackroyd’s last book, I found this story quite difficult to get into, it was only with a hundred pages to go, that I got into it, but not so much that I couldn’t put it down. This book is a lot less lecturing than the last one but I can’t help but think that Ackroyd writes to mentally challenge himself rather than for the joy of it, so it feels as if I’m reading a dry academic exercise instead of a powerful piece of prose.

I have one more book of this author’s to read and I have to say, I am not looking forward to it. However, never fear dear reader, I am not ready to throw in the towel yet. This challenge, although ‘challenging’ at times, has exposed me to more literary devices and one or two new writers whose work I would never have read if I hadn’t started doing this.

13. English Music by Peter Ackroyd

Two things jumped out at me when I opened this book. Firstly, there was no dedication (which wasn’t surprising as Ackroyd didn’t dedicate his previous book) and secondly, someone had scrawled on the front page of the book, ‘donation Jan 12′. These three words made me think ‘Who donated it? Why this book? How do you donate books to a library, do you just hand it in or do you donate money and a librarian chooses what to buy?’

At the beginning of this book, I was intrigued. It tells of a young boy called Timothy who lives in London with his only father as his mother died in child birth. He helps his father to heal people, not knowing that he too possesses healing powers. His world is a microcosm of social outcasts and failures. As he does not go to school, his friends are adults who are devoted followers of his father, who healed them. His father tries to educate his son in English music, or rather, English arts. This book is a celebration of English music, literature and art but unfortunately, it is poorly delivered.

After Ackroyd sets up Timothy’s insular world, he falls asleep whilst his father reads to him. We are told that his father usually reads Alice in Wonderland or The Pilgrim’s progress to him. It is unclear which book is read to Timothy as he falls asleep. The story then switches from first person to third person as Timothy’s dream is narrated. He dreams that he is in the same surreal landscape as Alice in Wonderland. There are Alice and Christian (the protagonist from Pilgrim’s Progress) who escort Timothy through changing landscapes in which there are strange occurrences.

At first I was disappointed that this sudden change took place as I was enjoying the main story before the dream sequence. Ackroyd managed to capture the dismal existence of society’s outcasts and their desperation to feel part of a group, so I had hoped that this dream interlude was a one-off.

As I read on, Timothy is suddenly taken away to live with his maternal grandparents in the countryside and goes to school where he makes a friend with Edward, who calls himself a cripple. Edward is determined not to be defined by his condition that he inherited from an ancestor.

Timothy hardly sees his father as he grows up but after Timothy finishes school, he returns to London in search of his father. It is a poignant and sad story about discovery and inheritance and whether to accept or fight against what you were given. Timothy inherits powers from his father and effectively, his career, yet Edward battles against his inherited disability and his ‘inheritance’ of his father’s job in the local village.

This story is very engaging but the tempo is broken by the interludes of Timothy’s dreams. The dreams follow the style of whomever Timothy is reading, watching, listening to just before he falls unconscious. The dreams are long and left me feeling bored. At one point, I started to skim over a particularly long dream about English music, which was probably the main point of the book. It was very annoying as this book would have been very good if it weren’t for the dreams. It felt as if Ackroyd’s publisher had told him to make his story longer so he filled it in with dreams.

Ackroyd tries to excuse these dreams with an arrogant statement at the beginning of his book, stating that the ‘scholarly reader will soon realise that I have appropriated (management speak for copied) passages from… the alert reader will understand why I have done so’. To be honest, you don’t need to be alert, you just need to read it. It was pretty obvious what Ackroyd was doing but it was like he was trying too hard to lecture the reader.
It is all very well and good showing off how clever you are, but not to the detriment of the story. Unlike Ackroyd’s previous book, this ambitious idea doesn’t quite make it.

12. The Death of King Arthur by Peter Ackroyd

The writer, Peter Ackroyd retold the original King Arthur stories so the modern day reader can enjoy them. It is an interesting concept, as many people have heard and kind of know the stories about King Arthur and his round table, but I suspect hardly any have read the actual story. I for one have not read the stories but I know the gist of the plot and I’ve seen the mysterious round table at Winchester, so it was great to be able to read the original story. Ackroyd acknowledges that he abbreviated the story to appeal to a more modern reader but yet tried to keep most of the original style. What is fascinating is that Ackroyd shortened the story as the original author, Thomas Malory, rambled on and was quite repetitive as this was what medieval readers found appealing. It is intriguing to think that the people’s writing styles change with the times. I wondered how different the writing style would be in a few hundred years time and whether the trends in writing will be very different from current ones, and how?

This question is quite pertinent at the moment as outside of this challenge, I am currently reading Baba Brinkman’s Rap Canterbury Tales. Brinkman is a hip hop artist who rewrote Chaucer’s Canterbury tales in the form of rap. The introduction to this book was really good as he paralleled Chaucer’s poetry to the hip hop rhymes. He showed similarities between both languages and I never really thought about how clever the rhymes are in hip hop battle rounds. So it is interesting that although some styles have changed, some have been reinvented and regained popularity.

Anyway, back to the book. It was quite refreshing reading a book that dispensed with setting the scene, internal monologues and first person narration to flesh out the character.

It reminded me of a child writing a story; it was very simple and straight to the action. This is by no means a derogatory remark; as I’ve said, it was quite refreshing to go straight into the story. Like old folk tales, or fairy tales (when did they become fairy tales?), you can sort of accept the blatant sexism and bloody violence in the story as it came from ‘that time’ also known as ‘a long time ago’. Recently, I went to see an immersive theatre production of Grimm’s fairy tales by Philip Pullman and it captured the essence of the fairy tale. It was magical.

The Death of King Arthur is the archetypal story of chivalrous knights engaging in exciting battles and adventure. One thing that really did stand out for me was Malory’s obsession with knights fighting for 2 hours. He uses this time frame to be an indicator of whether a battle is hard fought. In really hard fought battles, the knights would fight for 2 hours and then stop to say or ask something, generally something along the lines of ‘you are a good swordsman, what is your name?’ and they exchange names and then start fighting again for… yep, you’ve guessed it, 2 hours.

What makes King Arthur stories popular throughout the ages, is that it is set in a fairy tale land where you know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. It appeals to our inner child who still likes simplicity, particularly as life gets more complicated as we get older.

It is an ambitious idea by Ackroyd to rewrite the original King Arthur stories and to bring them to a modern audience whilst trying to maintain the authenticity of the original. I’m glad he has achieved this book as I have now actually read the story that I had heard so much about.

11. Touching Distance by Rebecca Abrams

For my mother, Sonia

Hello again. Happy New Year. It has been quite a while since I’ve posted what with Christmas holidays getting in the way, I haven’t commuted for a while which means that I haven’t read for a while. But here I am again with a new post. I had started reading this book before the Christmas holidays and stopped to eat and be merry, but then continued again. I will try and not let my reading break influence my opinion on this book.

Touching Distance is based on a true story about Alec Gordon, a Scottish doctor who tries to find out why so many women die soon after child birth. This book is about his struggle. Struggle to find out why and what is causing these deaths, struggle with his family and struggle with what he should do when he does make his discovery. It deals with the minutiae (I’m always looking for a way to fit this word into a sentence), but Abrams pulls this off. The narrative voice is muted in its style in that it is understated. This works very well to narrate Alec’s internal struggles.

I was intrigued about what it could be that caused the deaths of the women and why some died and some did not. I was really rooting for him to find out but also frustrated by his clumsy approach to enlightening people. However, this just makes him more real as a person I suppose. It is drawn out at times but again, not everything can be action all the time, particularly as it’s based around a true story.

So without giving too much away, I would suggest you read this book as his unsung hero deserves some attention for making a precious discovery. There are too many unsung heroes in this world and they should also have their story told.

10. The Path Of Thunder by Peter Abrahams

The first book without a dedication! At least I couldn’t find it but I thoroughly looked for it. This book was also a bit difficult to find. This is because in my local library, when I first started looking for books to start this challenge, I was a bit confused as there was a small section of books before the main section of books. I asked the librarian what this section was and he told me it was the black writers section. Now a part of me understands why this should be: to celebrate black writers and to have a visible presence in the library. However, another part of me thinks that this shouldn’t be made separate as it segregates writing and people may not find these books if they don’t go to this section. These books, along with other books, should be integrated to be read as part of every other book. So for my challenge, I’ve decided to stop this apartheid and integrate these books in my reading.

Talking of apartheid, this book was written in South Africa and was first published in 1933. It was quite an important and influential book for South African writers. It is about a man called Lanny who is ‘coloured’ (don’t worry, I’m not being racist, the term ‘coloured’ is a South African word that refers to a person who is mixed race, one parent being African and the other Caucasian) who goes back home to the northern Cape Karoo. He goes home to establish a school for coloureds and falls in love with a white woman called Sarie. At the end (yes, I am going to reveal the ending so please stop reading if you don’t want to know), the couple try to run away but they are obstructed by Sarie’s uncle. They escape back to her house and have have a shoot-out with Sarie’s uncle and his accomplices. The epilogue reveals that the press manipulate the story to Lanny running amok and killing people including Sarie.

This book obviously deals with racism but, more than that, it goes into the complexities of the race issue in South Africa. The coloureds do not belong to the black or the white cultures. They are seen as a separate group of people who fall into the cracks in society. Racism is seen between the whites and the blacks but also the blacks against the coloureds, the coloureds against the blacks and the whites against all of them and vice versa. Although the story now may seem simple in terms of the Romeo and Juliet love story, it was apparently quite influential at the time because hardly anyone had written about this issue in the country at the time.

It is a very brave book which isn’t afraid of telling the truth and that is why it is an important book. It is also well written; due to Abrahams’ portrayal of the characters, the love story between two people from different races is as believable as the prejudices of others. Like the previous book, the issues that this book raises are very topical now, given the racial tension in America due to the police being cleared of killing two black men in two separate, but closely timed incidents. This book should be on schools’ reading lists.

9. The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah

To Aqa Jaan

So I can let him go

This dedication makes me wonder if Aqa Jaan is a real person as he is the main protagonist in this book. However, at the end of the book, in the obligatory acknowledgement section, it states that this story is a work of fiction and not to be considered as fact. So perhaps Aqa Jaan is a very strong character that the writer has to write about otherwise he will haunt him forever.

Finally after a recent spate of shallow books, I found a book I could get my teeth into. This story tells of a household that runs a town’s mosque in Iran. Aqa Jaan is the head of the house, and there are his family, the Imam’s family, the cleaners and other people who come and go. It could be very confusing as I am ignorant about Iran and am not used to the names. However, there is a handy family tree at the beginning of the book which helped me to keep track of things.

The house and the mosque get torn apart by the Iranian revolution in 1979. It is quite an evocative book and manages to create a world that although is very different to mine, I could easily imagine it. The writer is also very good at getting into the characters’ minds and letting the reader know their motivations and emotions so that I could empathise with the characters even though they are very different to me.

The author shows how a religious revolution which is at first welcomed by its people, quickly turns on its supporters. Aqa Jaan first approves acts of rebellion against the Shah who is supported by America and he is ecstatic when the Shah gets overthrown. However, the regime recruits over-zealous people who have their own agenda and become perpetrators of violence. There is Imam Khalkhal whose ambition and belief overcomes his compassion when he is recruited to act as Allah’s judge and executioner. He is also the father of Lizard, a boy who was born just before the revolution who walks on all fours like a lizard and cannot speak. Lizard is the victim and the product of his father’s dark side. He is killed when he gets in the way of an important Aytollah being assassinated by Shahbal, son of a blind man who lived at Aqa Jaan’s house. Like all victims of violence, Aqa Jaan yearns for peace. Years later, Shahbal writes a letter to Aqa Jaan, informing him that he has escaped to the Netherlands and that he will make the world aware of the atrocities that occurred at home. I read the short biography of the author and was surprised to read that the author’s name, Kader Abdolah, is an alias and that he wrote resistant literature during the Iranian revolution in Iran and also escaped to the Netherlands. Clearly Shahbal was partly based on the writer.

 

It was interesting to read this book at a time of on-going problems in the Middle East and the uprising of Al-Qaida and then Isis. It is worrying and sad that there has been a ‘war’ and on-going religious violence since 2001, or more likely that there has always been violence somewhere in the world but I have noticed it more since that time. What this book does is to show that Muslims are like everyone else in that they care for their family, worry about their everyday affairs and that the majority of them want peace.

 

This is an excellent book and as you can see, this is one of my longest posts. It is an endearing story that is woven onto the background of a real life event and crammed full of symbolism and imagery (I don’t have enough time to go into and I want to leave something for the reader). It is entertaining yet gritty. In short, this is my kind of book.