A Cautionary Tale: Never Let Me Go and the perils of watching the movie first

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I saw “Never Let Me Go” years back. Can’t remember why. I can remember a few scenes, a few scattered bits and pieces. That’s all.

But it still wrecked the book for me.

I’m not giving the standard complaints here: I didn’t mind that things were spoiled. The art of a great novel is a joy in itself–when reading, a good reveal makes for a fleeting satisfaction, while the crafting is makes for lasting.

It’s just that I couldn’t stop trying to imagine the actresses I remembered from the movie. I couldn’t stop trying to force them into the novel. Couldn’t stop wracking my brains to remember whether this scene occurred in the movie too.

That’s the real reason to read a book first. Because the movie will force itself on the book in a way that just isn’t possible in reverse. Reading a book first enhances the enjoyment of a movie: you see an interpretation different from your own, and you can appreciate the whole thing in a new way. But when you see the movie first, that interpretation has already become “the only one” in your mind. It’s hard to get away from that.

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Sounder

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The black family without a father. The man sent away to prison and destroyed by the system. The pain of poverty. This story is not unique to the world today–it is in fact the story of “Sounder,” which takes place in an unnamed time. Time is loose in this novel, the exact years never specified, the story moving at the same pace across weeks or hours. Time, like history, is ever-present but hard to name.

It’s funny how problems we think of as contemporary can go so very, very much deeper than we like to think about. We blame a lot of things on the media, or the modern drug culture, or the modern whatever. So many people take it for granted that things are worse than they used to be.

But that lets us off the hook. We can complain that someone else brought this to us. This is a new problem, and its newness makes it vulnerable.

The problems of the prison system are not new. And if contemporary society were as free of racism as so many like to claim, this book would no longer be relatable.

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A Peopled Constellation: The Luminaries

Do you love not knowing? When you understand the basics of what happened in a plot, but you can feel that you’ve only begun to grasp the novel’s soul?

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Then you’ll love The Luminaries. I’m normally skeptical of books about mostly middle-aged white men, but I read an intriguing interview. A Booker Prize judge said that the judges have read the finalists 3 times by the time they choose a winner, so a novel has to have serious depth to reward three readings. As a person who likes a good deep read, I picked the book up.

First of all, you won’t understand most of what’s happening up front. You’re thrown into a country you know nothing about, with a complicated and multifaceted cast of characters who you will slowly get to know.

And every section (each of which covers only a day, with some flashing forward and back and stories-within-stories) begins with a star chart. The dramatis personae at the book’s front labels people as planets and influences. Each chart shows how they interact with one another. As someone who knows next to nothing about astrology, all I can say is that they were strangely compelling, and probably meant a lot to someone more knowledgeable than I.

The novel itself is so beautiful, so rich and interesting, that you don’t even care how much is being concealed from you. You puzzle over the mysteries, but you keep reading not just to find out the plot but to immerse yourself in the beautiful language, in the rich and strange world Catton evokes. It’s a compulsion, but not like that of a cheap thriller. It’s a deeper compulsion, something just as intense in its own way. It’s an attraction to wonder.

Music: Abigail Washburn, Crooked Still, Sarah Jarosz

Before She Met Me: Playing With Shakespeare

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A man is in a loving relationship. He drives himself mad over imagined jealousies, and ends up committing a murder-suicide.

That’s the basic plot of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” and of Julian Barnes’s novel “Before She Met Me.”

The fact is, if writer’s didn’t rip off Shakespeare, pretty much most of literary history would have gone unwritten. So the question isn’t “did Barnes rip off Shakespeare,” but “did Barnes rip off Shakespeare well?” And he did.

Back in the day, if you were going to imagine infidelity you’d only be able to do so in your own mind. It was all up to the imagination. It needed at least someone to spur it on.

How would that story play out today? You’d have to factor in the rise of pyschology, easily available porn, new attitudes to masturbation, film, movies, television commercials, publishing schedules: a multitude of things, the rise of the visual feeding off itself, morphing and changing jealousy into something intense, something insane.

Madness may be madness, leading inevitably down the road to violence and destruction. But over time, it has changed. Madness of today is a new monster, a beast utterly changed from Shakespeare’s time, but still ultimately recognizable. It’s a strange, beautiful, and uniquely modern project to play with Shakespeare this way, and Barnes does it brilliantly.

The God of Small Things

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I’m not going to compare this book to other novels. I’m not going to talk about books where the prose sings, where the characters make you ache with familiarity and fear, where death lurks in every corner and fate–or is it something else–hangs over every head. Temporal mix-up narratives, children’s viewpoints, forbidden love–all of these things are in other novels.

But none of those novels are like this one. Not one.

This novel is both complicated and simple. It is a sinuous and confusing read, the events playing out in an order that has nothing to do with logic. The language is unlike anything ever spoken or written before. The plot, which involves the complicity and choice of every character, whose cause-effect-cause-effect can be traced back to the beginning of time, to the beginning of a life, to the a few simple selfish choices, is extremely complex. The layers of choice and choicelessness, of fate and fear, are such that everyone is part of everything. All the time.

But it’s simple, too. It’s about human nature. About the Love Laws, that everyone knows. About the end of childhood. About death and the end of living.

Everything about the book is beautiful and complicated, in one glorious piece of achingly, gorgeously painful art. But everything about the book is simple, too. Because everything is about the things men do. And women. Governments and history. The arbiters of life and death. Big and Small.

Cloud Atlas and The Stuff of Stories

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What separates a life from a story? Really, what is the difference? Where does our story end and our life begin.

What is a soul, if not the story of our selves?

David Mitchell’s book gets touted for a cool plot, for the story-within-story elements, but that’s just the surface stuff. What the novel’s really about is the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Stories of the future, of the past. Stories of prediction and revision. Stories of atoms that are all the same, really, but appear in an infinite set of variations. Stories of clouds.

Each character exists only within their own story. As the book unwinds in its second half, it is as if each story exists only through its instigation by the previous story. Each life seems to birth another, older life, a life that is somehow both sequel and prequel.

A life, a plot, an ending. But there is one all-important thing every story needs, something that is all to often forgotten: a listener. Someone to dream the dream again. That’s what Cloud Atlas is about. Dreaming each others’ dreams.

The Inheritance of Loss

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What does anyone want? To live their life. To love and be loved in return. To be happy. To live a good life.

That’s what each of us wants, and so often we wonder why we can’t be allowed to have it. Why does love always fail us? Why do the people we care about betray us? Why does the world get in the way of our happiness so often?

In Kiran Desai’s novel “The Inheritance of Loss,” history is always getting in the way of happiness. Every man and woman has an elaborate history of class, money, caste, and ethnicity. Their faces and languages define them far more than their selves ever could.

Some of them are aware of this. A retired judge loathed his wife for years because she represented everything he hated in the history of his self. She was Indian, and impoverished. And he adored his Irish Setter devotedly because in her he saw reflected all that he had ever wanted to be, the simplicity of civilization.

A young girl, orphaned by Soviet-Indo politics and a bus, fell in love for the first time and discovered that the world does not let happiness alone.

It’s fascinating to watch the intersection of history, of life, and of love in a few characters. To see how loss and love and hate can be inherited from nameless and faceless ancestors. To understand the presence of time, past present and future, in every moment of our lives.

The Coal Black Pool at the End of All Things: “Ragnarok”

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AS Byatt’s retelling of the Norse myths could have been a capitalistic send-up, designed only to make money. Instead, Byatt wrote about the myths that touched her the most as a child, about the end of the world in Norse myth.

Byatt mulls over the meaning of myths, and the purpose of myths. How can something so far from “true” matter so much? How do we come to terms with the inevitability of death? How do stories help us live?

Finally, Byatt’s setting, a child in WWII era Britain, is a stroke of genius. The world was such a mad place that the “truth” seemed more abstract to this child than myths.

The Content of a Life: “Flaubert’s Parrot”

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What does it mean, to have lived? What have we left behind when we go? If someone were to tell the story of our life, which story would they tell? Which one is true? What does that all even matter?

These are the questions that Julian Barnes tried to answer in writing “Flaubert’s Parrot.” The title refers to a stuffed parrot Flaubert had on his desk, of which two authenticated versions are displayed in France. Which one is real? Who even cares?

Just as the narrator of the novel seeks to figure out which parrot is real, he spends most of his book turning the life of Flaubert over in his head, looking at it now from the angle of a critic, now from the angle of Flaubert’s longtime lover. Every dissecting piece of the novel is true, and yet not true–if everything’s true then what does true even mean after all?

I may be recounting this in a really confusing way, but I promise Mr. Barnes is way better at it then I am. He adds humor in unexpected places, poignancy where there could easily be silliness, and a fantastic sketch of life. Because in the end, the story itself isn’t actually about Flaubert. It’s about the narrator, the man who is spending his days thinking about a dead man, a writer, and trying to figure out what a “pure story” is.

The Crafting of Other Beings: The Children’s Book

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What does it mean, that we are shaped by the people around us? By the stories we tell ourselves, and are told by others? What does that create?

Those are some of the questions AS Byatt considered as she wrote “The Children’s Book”. The title comes from the practice of one of the characters, Olive, of writing a story for each of her children, a special magic story in which they are the hero or heroine. That’s not the only story Olive’s large brood of children are told, and the process by which those stories shape them is the psychological centerpiece of the book.

But the book isn’t just a psychological unpacking of development: it’s also a fantastic piece of historical fiction. The bulk of the book is set in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period, and Byatt makes the time come alive. She delves into the lives of men and women of all classes, into their hopes, aspirations, and desires, and she creates a cast of characters whose ways of interacting with the world are each unique and fascinating.

The best historical fiction is not about “modern women/men stuck in the past,” but rather about people, people who no matter what time they are born in have their own hopes and dreams, fears and desires. In each period, the way their lives are shaped by their selves changes. Sometimes, as in the Victorian age, women who wanted a career were not allowed to marry. Single motherhood is a difficult option that women, nonetheless, have been willing to make sacrifices for in many different periods.

Not only has Byatt brought a period alive in this book, but a staggering cast of characters. There must be two dozen, with an ever-changing web of relationships knitting them together–not a book for the faint of heart.

In an interesting way, “The Children’s Book” is inarguable an epic. It’s big, and has a big cast. But it bucks the conventions of an epic, choosing depth over breadth, focusing on a small period of time and a handful of locations. And this focus is the novel’s strength, because when calamity strikes in the looming First World War, the true fragility of this complicated world becomes painfully clear. It’s a work of beauty, and anyone who like a good doorstopper book should read it.