I Knows What I Like…

One of the great things about getting old ( actually there’s only two, the other being my Bus Pass) is not feeling that you have to concur with received opinion about what is ‘good’ and / or ‘cool’. Apart from anything else, being ‘on trend’ is a very demanding activity as far as I remember: the path between being cool and uncool is a narrow and treacherous one. One slip up and you risk being mired in mainstream thinking. Of course it would be disingenuous to claim I’m indifferent to what other people think of me, because I’m not, but I am confident enough ( as regards books anyway) to say that I don’t give a fish’s right tit which prizes / awards / accolades a book has won: I either like it or don’t.

I didn’t like Han Kang’s The Vegetarian ( translated by Deborah Smith ) which was winner of this year’s Man Booker. Set in South Korea this is the story of Yeong-hye who is an ordinary and dutiful wife. As a result of a dream she refuses to eat meat and, when forced to do so by her father, stabs herself. She then spirals further and further into fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison (ie killing herself through starvation) and becoming a tree. Yes, a tree. I’m sure this book politically and socially must be about far more than the story of one woman with mental health issues and the effect of her illness on the people around her but unfortunately I didn’t attain that level of understanding. Described in a blurb as ‘ fraught, disturbing, and beautiful’ my adjectives of choice would be insignificant and annoying ( I can’t think of a third )

Contrast this with my best June read – William Boyd’s sixteenth novel Sweet Caress, a book which, as the title suggests, wraps the reader in a warm blanket of pleasure. Amory Clay is a photographer and with a life which spans the twentieth century her fictional biography becomes a piece of social history as well as a wonderful story of a complicated, trailblazing woman. The book, in the manner of an actual biography, contains photographs, some of her and her family and others purporting to be taken by her. But this is all a jolly clever wheeze on the part of Boyd ( who apparently has done this sort of thing before ) because the whole thing is a construct, including the title which comes from a quotation from an imaginary novel written by one of Amory’s lovers. Included in the list of acknowledgements at the end of the book are some real female photographers amongst the fictional ones.

So…I’ve nothing against authors showing off their cleverness, as long as at the heart of their work there remains some empathy and humanity. By way of illustration, here’s Amory, towards the end of her life, reflecting how in old age we treat our bodies and houses in the same sort of way:

“We make do, favour the right leg, use the left hand, slip a paperback under the armchair where the castor should be. It amazes me what compromises we happily live with. We limp along, patching up, improvising.”