Hungry City - Carolyn Steel

I've rarely enjoyed the pleasure of a non-fiction book that brings together so many of my favourite themes for consideration.

I came across Carolyn Steel as the presenter of the keynote address for this year's State of Design festival. Steel is an architect by trade, but some years ago started researching how the design of our cities reflects, is influenced by and (especially in modern cities) ignores our relationship with food and its supply.

Steel is a rapid and enthusiastic speaker, unable to resist delving into tangents, then berating herself for not sticking to the vital facts in her allotted time. Despite both the restrictions and diversion, she did an impressive job of precising much of the book's 300 pages of content in an hour. Steel is clearly intimately engaged with her subject and it's a further credit to her that the book is so nuanced; she doesn't run away with passionate polemic, but her message is forceful regardless.

So what is that message? Hungry City argues that we cannot persist with building cities that ignore the realities of food supply. The 'sustainable city' is a common theme in today's media, whether in discussions about more bike paths, urban gardening or solar power rebates. Steel's argument, however, is more fundamental than that. It's not about improving what we have, it's about rethinking design and paying closer attention to the chains of power that control the supply of food around the world.

This is also about much more than food miles, which themselves aren't a new phenomenon. In Ancient Rome, the citizens dined on delicacies from as far away as Egypt and Spain. Steel traces the history of town- and city-building back to Sumerian times, when the first zoned habitable areas appeared out of a need to store and trade grain. (Ironically, it was our evolution to eat grass, rather than just meat, that was the first step in the journey that led to today's megalopises - we were no longer limited to town sizes that could be supported by the amount of livestock within walking distance.)

The story travels from Sumeria to Rome to post-industrialisation, to the development of the shopping mall in mid-20th-century America, the decline of independent stores in Britain and absurd zoning allowances for megamarkets, all the way through to a futuristic city of vertical factories. It's a lot to stomach, but in a fulfilling way.

'Small World' - Matt Beaumont

In 2000, Matt Beaumont published e, a novel written entirely in email exchanges between the employees of an ego-drenched London advertising agency. Its humour and observations would appeal to any fans of The Gruen Transfer. I've followed his work since that first novel had me chuckling and referencing for days.

Where There's a Will continued the vein of comedy, but added a more bittersweet twist. It tells the story of Alvin, a perennial do-gooder, whose philanthropy is out of kilter with the cynicism and solipsism of those around him. It featured some wry and worthy observations, but the plot relied a little too heavily on coincidence and circumstance.

Enter Small World, wherein Beaumont combines key elements of both of those earlier novels, to varying effect. Clearly not one to be too limited by straight prose, but wanting something other than a modern 'epistolary' novel, Beaumont presents a story told from a dozen different perspectives. The first-person narrator switches within scenes, within pieces of dialogue, introduced simply by the character's name and a colon.

It's unbelievably off-putting at first, and my experience of this novel very nearly ended within twenty pages. We firstly meet a group of three married couples - tricky enough to remember who is friends with whom, who is married to whom, who fancies (or indeed stalks) whom. The perspectives then branch ever further: a policeman arrives at the house where the six are having a dinner party, and enters the first-person milieu. So does his girlfriend, who's the PA to one of the Original Six, a HR manager. So does the nanny of the HR manager, and the nurse she sees at the hospital when she takes her young charge for treatment. The nurse is the mother of the boyfriend of the shop assistant for another member of the Original Six (who is being stalked by the husband of the HR manager).

It's a complex latticework, and one that does stretch the boundaries of credulity a little bit. Some characters seem to be there just to add to the complexity - not all of them manage a distinctive voice, nor do all their stories contribute significantly to the overall plot momentum. The differences between each character voice are subtle for the most part, and that's one of the most curious elements of the novel. Normally books with multiple perspectives present each voice in large chunks, giving the reader time to get to know the character through their voice, mannerisms and reactions. With such rapid changes between perspective, there would be no narrative cohesion if Beaumont did that: the language remains much the same; at least it does between the white upper-class characters who make up the bulk of the cast. When it comes to Jenka, a Czech nanny, Beaumont is cruelly stereotypical and patronising, giving her broken, comedic English and furnishing her only with a desire to have her nose reshaped to look like Charlize Theron.

But what of the story? Just as this group of characters is implausibly connected (it would seem only ten or 15 people provide all the services and action in north London) their lives contain the melodrama of a daytime soap. Characters die, get attacked, have surgery, almost lose family members, end marriages, lose jobs and generally have a pretty shit time of it for much of the novel. For most, their saving grace is the power of the people around them to help, whether friends or strangers.

Beaumont weaves a tight web of interactivity, and with so many characters funnelling their experiences into the plot the reader is presented with several stereotypes - of mothers (or women desperate to be mothers) in particular. The connections between the characters do become ridiculous, especially with a long lost half-sister finding herself (unknowingly) on the same hospital ward as her sibling, although they live hundreds of kilometres apart. Perhaps, however, Beaumont was aiming for archetypes. With so many characters to empathise with, they need to be quickly sketched so we know who we're dealing with as the narrative perspective continually changes. (At times the perspective changes mid-dialogue just to give us a first-person reaction that could as easily have been described in the third-person.) The intended effect was perhaps to remind us of the propensity to find love and support in any of our relationships, and that anyone we meet could be connected to us in a way that means they deserve our respect and attention, rather than admonition and judgement.

Of course, attendant to that is the idea that people who do bad things could just as easily be closely connected to us. The 'bad guys' in Beaumont's novel are not fully redeemed, although they do reach a state of contrition.

In some ways, this novel can be compared to Christon Tsiolkas' The Slap (which has done very well in England), in that it details the machinations of a closely connected group of (mainly) young people, who are as connected to their urban environment as they are to each other. It does have some provocative themes. A character undergoing IVF is frank about the negative effect of the treatment on her emotions and the unfair impact this has on her husband. It has a character to match Harry, Tsiolkas' most hateful creation: Keith the policeman, an unsatisfiable arsehole of thwarted ambitions. Nannying and the respective responsibilities of paid help versus parents get a look-in as well.

The novel's ending is far brighter than much of the dark humour that has pervaded throughout, but given the licence taken with all these intersecting lives it's hardly surprising that things end up unrealistically cheesy as well. Beaumont manages to create enough intrigue for us to crave a conclusion, but I'm not convinced that this story and its message were strong enough on their own, separated from the conceit of multi-perspective narration.

'The Hippopotamus' - Stephen Fry

Recently I had cause to answer the question: who do you rank among the cleverest minds of our time? It's one of those frustrating enquiries, for which you know you've come across candidates, but put on the spot it can be hard to come up with a good answer, one that doesn't seem trite or obvious.

A day or so later, the perfect answer came into my mind: Stephen Fry. He is, irrefutably, a clever man. And one who has used being clever as a means to a very successful career. Watching him weekly on 'QI', one can never quite tell how much of the copious knowledge he spouts comes from research he's done for that specific show, the notes on the cards in front of him, or simply out of the larger-than-average font of knowledge that encompasses his brain.

In The Fry Chronicles, his autobiography, Fry endeavoured to affect a humility, a sense of 'Oh shucks, I'm such a lucky chap, I really don't know what I've done to deserve this good fortune'. He's routinely generous in praise for his friends - Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Ben Elton (a joke-writing machine), Douglas Adams etc - and just as self-deprecating about his own talents. At the same time, he can't escape the fact that he's in a position to share his life story in a form that is likely to sell very well indeed, because of the very gifts he's keen to downplay, even dismiss. He must, of course, be acutely aware that he is, in fact, famous and that he's using the skills that have brought him to fame to his advantage.

The Fry empire covers making documentaries and TV series, acting in a few films, hosting a quiz show and stage shows, tweeting, and writing screenplays and novels. The Hippopotamus tells the story of Ted Wallace, a cantankerous old upper-class poet, fired from his job as newspaper drama critic, who is sent to the palatial Norwich home of his old school chum Michael Logan at the behest of his goddaughter, to investigate and report back on 'miracles' seemingly performed by the Logans' son. The hippopotamus of the title refers to Ted himself - he is a fat, wallowing, difficult creature.

Stephen Fry is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect, but this is not a good book. This novel is an expurgation - it's Fry getting out all the witty turns of phrase, all the horrid toffee-nosed characters whose seeds have been planted in his writerly mind as he mingles ever more frequently with the highest British society. It's a chance for him to write about women salaciously, and frankly, it's all quite appalling.

The storyline is absurd, and isn't at all helped by the multiple storytelling methods. Ted is hard enough to like, without his characterisation coming variously from his own voluminous letters to his goddaughter, first person narration, third person observation and stitled dialogue from other characters.

Here's Fry, as Wallace, describing lunch:

Luncheon lies between the servantless breakfast served from tureens and the formal fig-feast of dinner in ceremony as in chronology. The library serves as the muster station and pre-prandial lapping-pool of choice; thence we are gonged to the dining room for solids....the imbibal of anything stronger than iced water is uncommon

Language and topics throughout are trite, contrived, pompous and pretentious. Entirely suitable, perhaps, given the class of Brits Fry is depicting.

There's also a scene with a horse that goes where Daniel Radcliffe presumably didn't go on stage in Equus. Call me squeamish but it was a bit more than I was up for.

Storytelling stories: 'Oracle Night' and 'Cloud Atlas'

It's a delicate device, choosing to have characters within a novel tell their own stories. At its most overt, the author presents their protagonist as a writer, which can lead to all sorts of wheels-within-wheels scenarios, as you wonder where the author ends and the character begins.

Paul Auster runs visually and virtually parallel stories through Oracle Night. His principal character, Sidney Orr, is a writer, and he talks frequently about his own authoring experience and that of his colleagues. The novel follows Sidney for a period of nine days or so in the eighties, after he purchases a Portuguese notebook from a small Brooklyn stationer, and begins to write for the first time after a long illness.

Sidney gets the idea of a story to write from a snippet in The Maltese Falcon. He takes inspiration from that story to write a tale about a man who walks out on his life after a lucky escape from an accident. Early in the book, large chunks of this 'second-level' story are reproduced. At the first level, Auster presents us with a protagonist who is a writer, creating a story. Within that story, the protagonist is an editor, who is reading a manuscript. And yes, within the second-level story we have a third-level story, as his protagonist reads through and summarises the manuscript (called Oracle Night, as is the novel).

Adding to all of this, when Auster is in his first-level story, he uses footnotes to provide background information. The footnotes are written in the voice of the protagonist, not of the author, adding a layer of complexity and separation from the reader - one starts to question exactly what they're reading. They're not brief, either. Most go across multiple pages, so you have to turn the page(s) to finish reading the footnote, before turning back to where you were in the story.

As I was describing the book's structure to a friend, I found all this talk of second- and third-level stories reminiscent of a certain high-grossing feature film released earlier this year. The comparison came even closer to Inception when Sidney's wife, Grace, described a dream to him (one which resembled the story Sidney was scribbling in his alluring notebook). She ends the description by saying:

People can't die in their dreams, you know...That's how it works. As long as you're dreaming, there's always a way out.

Spinning-top totem, anyone? I wonder if Christopher Nolan is a Auster fan...

Auster's style superficially is very reminiscent of Philip Roth. Both write of men embedded in New York and display an intimate familiarity with the city. Roth too uses writers as protagonists, as in The Ghost Writer (not to be confused with the recent film based on a Robert Harris novel of the same name) and Exit Ghost, and presents stories within stories. Because of that similarity, I felt I was reading a much older book. I was surprised when I realised it was published in 2003 - strange how you can make assumptions about the age of a piece, and how those assumptions affect your reactions to it.

Published the year after Oracle Night was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Mitchell also takes an unusual approach to storytelling, relating six different narratives, in six extremely different styles, starting in a Pacific colony in the 1800s and progressing to 'beyond the future'; that is, the penultimate narrative is futuristic, and the last is the future of that future. Speaking of totems, too, tiny details travel with the characters throughout time and narrative.

Each narrative stops abruptly, making the transition to a new voice and time even rougher on the reader. The strongest testament to Mitchell's writing prowess is how quickly the reader feels comfortable with each new style.

Now, I recognise that producing a novel with various narrative voices doesn't sound unusual on the surface of it. But Mitchell does something very special (this isn't a plot spoiler, but my enjoyment of the book was enhanced by the surprise of not knowing how it worked overall, so feel free to skip the rest of the post). At the book's mid-point, the 'future future' narrative ends, and segues back to the penultimate narrative. The book then progresses backwards through time, completing each story. It's a genius technique, like returning to half a dozen unfinished books in a row, reminding yourself of missed characters and reaching the catharsis of resolution multiple times.

Where it fits into this post is that each of the narratives use the protagonist as storyteller, whether it's written as a diary account, as an interview with an archivist, as a lost novel, as letter, or around a futuristic campfire. What Mitchell reminds us of is the universality and timelessness of storytelling. Certainly, its written formats might change, but we will always communicate our stories and there will always be room for words.

Changing the climate: 'Solar' and 'Freedom'

Ian McEwan really only has himself to blame for his latest work, Solar, being dubbed a 'climate change novel'. He used the appelation himself a couple of years ago at the Adelaide Writers Festival, while the book was still a work in progress.

It's a climate change novel, though, in the same way that Enduring Love is about hot-air ballooning: in both cases, the named element is a device, something used to manipulate the characters into situations that allow the writer to reveal their message.

Certainly, McEwan's message is focussed on consumption, excess and the consequences thereof. His protagonist, Michael Beard, is in many ways a repulsive character, an embodiment of capitalism, consumerism and hubris. Once an eminent scientist - a Nobel prize winner, no less - Beard admits:

...two decades had passed since he last sat down in silence and solitude for hours on end, pencil and pad in hand, to do some thinking, to have an original hypothesis, play with it, pursue it, tease it into life. The occasion never arose - no, that was a weak excuse. He lacked the will, the material, he lacked the spark. He had no new ideas.

Even someone whose fame and living has been made through intellectual concepts finds themselves more concerned with material acquisition than mental competency. This sentiment echoes our obsession with new technology: online networking rather than meeting face-to-face; satnavs instead of maps; e-readers rather than books. Everything pixelated is but a reworking of an existing idea; they are alternatives, rarely replacements, and nearly always more damaging in terms of the resources needed to manufacture them.

One review of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, called it the Novel of the Century. We're only ten years in and such hyperbole goes hand-in-hand with Franzen's own mockery of a society gone crazy for the wrong things, things that will precipitate the downfall of much good in the world.

Having said that, history could prove that reviewer exactly right, since this is an astonishing, genius piece of work. If you want to know anything at all about the craft of story-telling, about presenting well-rounded, believable and empathetic characters, read Franzen.

In Freedom, Franzen delivers invectives against the Iraq war, sub-prime mortgages, abuse of natural resources, mining and corporate monopolies. The freedom his characters crave is not so much liberation from any form of bondage, or even to act out of free-will. It's almost post-freedom, in which we are liberated to fuck everything up - to ruin marriages, sleep with employees, make money from immoral ventures, live off better-natured people.

Environmentalism is a surprisingly strong plotline in the novel, as the main character, Walter, takes over a Trust dedicated to saving the cerulean warbler. Just as Michael Beard ends up being a hateful choice to save the world through the development of a photosynthesising cell, Walter's Trust will save this one bird species by firstly mining pristine land, before 'reclaiming' it. Both authors are sending the message that we are beyond the tipping point, we're already past saving face in the eyes of future generations. They present bureaucracies and systems in disarray, disempowered to make meaningful change. What Franzen is reminding us of is the ultimate freedom: to act altruistically, to live a life of minimal outward impact and maximum internal satisfaction.

Human frailty: 'Blindness' and 'The Children of Men'

A dystopia is a powerful world for an author to evoke. It is made all the more potent when created through a single permutation in normality, revealing how fragile our hold on security has been made by 'progress'. P.D. James' Children of Men and Jose Saramago's Blindness both explore a world wracked by a single failing that - slowly or quickly - is the undoing of mankind.

(Coincidentally, both books were made into movies within two years of each other, both starring Julianne Moore.)

In P.D. James' The Children of Men, humankind has lost the ability to reproduce. Rather than presenting a post-apocalytpic world, James' is mid-apocalyptic: humanity is dying, not suddenly through a cataclysmic attack, but patiently, as the population inexorably ages.

Hers is a fascinating concept. Just what would we do if the human race became infertile? What would be the first industries and services to suffer? The social implications are so forseeable and worthy of scrutiny that the outcomes of such an event could be explored systematically, in a future-doco format.

James instead creates a protagonist, Theo Farron, upon whom to hinge the plot. His centrality to events past - his childhood with Britain's ruler - and present - a splinter group's choice to ask him to help them - is unfeasible and stalls the book to an extent. James concerns herself solely with the situation in England (and a small portion of that country at that). The book offers no explanation for the infertility, and the fact that births simply stopped in 1995 is conceptually problematic.

Those born in 1995 - all 25 years old at the time of the book's setting - are known as Omegas, and bear an uncanny resemblance to today's Gen Ys. They are described as 'indulged ... arrogant ... without animation or energy'. The similarity can only be inadvertent since the book was written in 1992. It's an intriguing device, imbuing this unprecedented consciousness into the last-born, but again relies on society functioning a little more neatly and uniformly than it does.

The protagonist Theo is a professor at Oxford, and cousin to the Warden of England, a benevolent dictator who rules the country assisted by a council of four. James' choice of governance warrants further consideration. What would happen to our governments if our race were not to see out the century? The cynical thought occurs that we're already ruled like a nation with noone under 25 and 90% of the population over 50. But would parliament be disbanded? Would one person emerge to take on responsibility for keeping order, keeping the electricity running, finding something for the schoolteachers, childcare workers and children's retailers to do?

Theo's world is a strange one, straddling two genres: it is neither a futuristic rendering from sci-fi, nor a barely recognisable, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Many scenes feature derelict buildings and nature overrunning man-made structures - with fewer people this world has finally solved the housing crisis - alongside normality as Theo drives to work and shop.

The story was significantly altered for the movie verson (Theo Farron is no Clive Owen!), but the filmed version provoked a similar ambivalence of criticism, with many respecting the premise but questioning the execution.

Blindess explores a different calamity: an epidemic of non-seeing, which rapidly reduces the world to barbarism and criminality. Again, it's a singular change, yet its ramifications are feasibly encompassing and horrific. The blindess is contagious, and the first couple of hundred people afflicted are quarantined. Very quickly, though, they must fend entirely for themselves. Just as quickly, their quarantine station descends into the most basic of barbarism.

The descent is both quick and total. Saramago spares no attention to detail of the excrement, the despair, the violence, and the lust, of both the requited and forced kind. The book featured scenes I found difficult to read; from discussions with others who've read it I think most will find something hard to get through, but what it is depends on your personal sensitivity.

What I found difficult was the notion that we would necessarily descend to rape and pillage, if 200 random humans were left alone in desparate circumstances. The quarantine station Saramago creates serves as a microcosm; when the sequestered get out, they realise the quarantine was a fruitless ordeal, since the plague of blindness has spread universally. The group in quarantine, therefore, serve Saramago's literary licence, as they must display what is worst - and in the case of one or two characters - what is best in us.

Saramago's writing style is peculiar - he believes in long paragraphs, with no visual distinction between dialogue and prose. I haven't read other books of his to know if this is his standard, but in this book it's effective in disorienting the reader, and bringing them closer to an empathy with these characters who have also lost their orientation.

It's astonishing to consider how fundamentally that one change would alter existence. How would we eat if noone could distinguish between the packets? Who would manage our utilities if noone could see the dials? How would you find your way home if you were out when the blindness struck? Saramago describes the blindness as a white world, reinforcing the point that everything we have built is still there - and illuminated, if the people could only see.

'Juliet, Naked' - Nick Hornby

There's no doubting Nick Hornby's success as a writer: novels, films - both from his books and written by him - syndication, collected columns, musings (such as 31 Songs). Hornby practically created the genre of witty, observational man-lit; certainly he retains ownership of it.

For all that, I didn't come to Juliet, Naked with huge expectations. Not everything he has written has been brilliant. How to be Good was an unsuccessful experiment with a female protagonist; A Long Way Down was an ambitious execution, comprising mainly of dialogue between four massively disparate characters, brought together by a coincidental attempt at suicide.

Hornby's consistency lies in his insistence on tackling issues at odds with his subject matter. You could dismiss him as light hearted - there's no denying the man is funny - but in writing about the every day, about bumbling blokes and canny kids, he gets to the heart of issues that confront us everyday, but don't get a lot of write up.

Despite its awkward title, Juliet, Naked is a poignant, funny, insightful account of the reality of relationships of convenience. It delves into non-romance, with a fair bit of pop culture thrown in - let's face it, it wouldn't be Hornby wihtout it.

The title refers to an album, released by the reclusive Tucker Crowe. The fictional Crowe was a singer of reknown 20 years ago, his masterpiece being the aching album Juliet. While touring, he had an epiphany in a toilet and has never been seen in public nor heard of again. (I never managed to quite equate him with an existing singer; in the book he's described as a mix of Springsteen, Cohen and Dylan.)

Duncan, a middling Englishman, is a leading 'Crowologist', who receives a demo version of the seminal album. The stripped-back collection earns it the name Juliet, Naked. Duncan's partner, Annie, writes an honest but unappreciative review of the album - one that doubles as an appraisal of her relationship with Duncan: that it is but a veneer without substance. Tucker responds and the pieces of his life are slowly revealed.

Duncan and Annie's relationship is desultory and doomed, but it is the crux of the novel. Hornby's delicacy is at its best as he asks awkward questions of their decisions. They were friends in a dire seaside town who decided to shack up rather than grow old alone. Annie questions, given the outcome 15 years later, whether solitary living could really have been any worse. Theirs is the kind of relationship other writers would use as the basis of an alternative modern piece, a deviation from straightforward marriage or a de facto coupling. But Hornby tells us that even someone who has harboured low expectations from life can still realise that we all deserve something more and find the courage to seek it out.

The Arrogant Protagonist - Conceit or Correct?

One of my pet hates in literature is the arrogant narrator protagonist, often the product of an author who uses their book as a vehicle to reveal their extensive knowledge of some area - the more erudite the better.

I didn't enjoy Alan Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty for that reason - his digressions on the merits of Richard Strauss reeked of oneupmanship, and his protagonist seemed to have inherited his knowledge of antique furniture for one of two reasons: so he had something to talk about with his lorded companions; or so Hollinghurst could tell us how much he knew.

I struggled too with Turner's Paintbox, by Paul Morgan, as I've already recorded in my review. Morgan's special topic was the British painter J. M. W. Turner. Another Australian author, who I refuse to name on this blog - let's just say that his novels alone make up a double figure percentage of annual Australian book sales - has made his career by crafting an ill-gotten, formulaic stories around copious research (not all of which he did), in which he doesn't spare any detail of what his research team uncovered.

Ian McEwan introduces two such 'arrogant protagonists' in his earlier novels Amsterdam and Enduring Love. In the former, his composer protagonist agonises over arpeggios and scores; in the latter, Joe Rose is a scientist happy to critique his partner's doctoral theories on Keats, but who elaborates 'for her benefit' over finer details of the history of discovering DNA.

My problem with these asides (I commented on a similar one in Turner's Paintbox) is that they are extraneous to the plot. The fact that the author includes them means they either want to show their protagonist as a git - not a theory normally borne out by the rest of the book - or they're transferring their patronising tone to the reader.

A common weave runs through these characters I've felt so disassociated from. They're all men, as are the authors. Not that I think this is necessarily a problem exclusive to men; I think I felt similar things about Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders, though it's been some years since I read it. The characters are also all indisputably of a particular class - upper middle. Their pretensions normally focus on the arts, or in the case of Joe Rose, another area of academia.

When I came across Joe Rose, however, I began to think differently about this character type. Rather than a conceit of the author, perhaps it is simply an authentic representation of that demographic of upper-class, educated British (or Anglophilic) male. Their lives, though not without sadness, have been wrought amongst what most would classify as privilege. Their country has inculcated them with the hereditary of colonialism, and it's that sense of entitlement that underpins their depiction.

I think that theory could be borne out through a comparison with the protagonists of an American author such as Philip Roth - his are also educated men, though perhaps not always born into such a high class. In Roth's case the defining, inescapable character point is their Jewishness. While this produces a different set of character traits, it's as inseperable to their actions and prejudices as McEwan's colonialism.

McEwan of course has just released Solar, a novel 'about climate change', in that the key character is a scientist with an idea for an alternative power source. It's not a fictional version of The Weathermakers, rather a story wherein that current social preoccupation plays a siginificant role in the plot, as in 9/11 in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I await it with interest.

'The Raw Shark Texts' - Steven Hall

My two-word review of the Raw Shark Texts would be 'utterly compelling'. I could hardly call that impartial, however! I do regard this as one of the best novels I've read in some years, but it's not without its flaws.

The strength of the novel comes through its concept, one that explores the dangers lurking in our communications and the power of some media to enter or control our thoughts. Ironically, I feel it's a book where less communication about its content offers the reader a more rewarding experience, as they can be freshly surprised by the genius of Hall's intellectual creation as the story unfolds.

There are weaknesses in the execution, however. Dialogue, for example, can be trite, and particularly within the romantic sub-plot, it can become overly derivative. Perhaps the author is aware of that, as the key character acknowledges that he has remembered the conversations he recounts as cleverer than they were.

Hall's language skills are better employed in physical descriptions and tight scenes of drama and suspense. His language is both surreal and precise, employing cunning comparisons that allow him to place his hyper-realistic story deep within the ordinariness of our existence. On the first page, the reader is sucked in at speed:

My eyes slammed themselves capital O open and my neck and shoulders arched back in a huge inward heave, a single world-swallowing lung gulp of air. Litres of dry oxygen and floor dust whistled in and snagged up my throat with knifey coughing spasms. I choked and spat through heaves and gasps and coughing coughing coughing heaves. Snot ropes unwound from my nose. My eyesight melted into hot blurs over my cheeks.

I found this character description particularly visual:

Dr Randle was more like an electrical storm or some complicated particle reaction than a person. A large clashing event of a woman whose frizzy hack job of white-brown hair hummed against a big noisy blouse which, in turn, strobed in protest against her tartan skirt. She had strontium grey eyes which crackled away to themselves behind baggy lids. She made the air feel doomy, faintly radioactive. You half expected your ears to pop.

Hall's similes demonstrate his capacity to twist language into inventive, unexpected associations, and his obsession for language is made clear as it finds its way into so many of his comparisons: 'It was still raining outside. A dramatic wet sheet broke against the window followed by a haiku of fat rain taps as the wind took a breath'.

Conceptually, the book carries out a relentless assault. The framework of Hall's extraordinary plot allows him to take a concept down from the shelf, put in a snowdome and shake it around to see how it comes out in a new arrangement:

Maybe it's natural for questions to outlive their answers. Or maybe answers don't die but are just lost more easily, being so small and specific, like a coin dropped from the deck of a ship and into the big deep sea.

If you find the intellectual vacillations of the book a lot to take in, focus for a while on the various cameos of protagonist Eric's cat, Ian. He's a well-drawn character for an animal, his actions often described through brilliant, personifying descriptions:

After a moment, Ian's big ginger body stepped out, cautiously at first, and then, looking around with that not bad expression dads use when looking at other dads' new cars, he sauntered off into the depths of the warheouse.

The book also famously includes some dramatic typesetting, engineered by the author himself. I felt too that there was more to be read into some of the character names than first met the eye, either through aural similarity or the use of anagrams. In a book where a laptop becomes a lethal weapon, and someone's life can be endangered through an ill-chosen download, do the names Mycroft Ward and Clio Aames conjure any associations?

'A Spot of Bother' - Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon achieved a wide-reaching bestseller with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a book loved by book groups and literary types, and taken up by high schools for English studies. As in that earlier novel, Haddon again builds a story around observation. His main characters are a little less confrontational this time: rather than a teenager with Aspergers, the novel works through the buildup to a wedding from the point of view of the bride-to-be and her family. Each has their own issues; each finds themself in a potentially intractable situation through misjudged priorities. Her doubts about the nuptials increase as the date approaches; her mother is having an affair; her father incubates a growing insanity as mortality draws closer; and her brother must swap contentment for rejection as he dallies in his commitment to his boyfriend.

It is a book of pithy, warming observations, written in a style that sits somewhere between the wry humour of Nick Hornby and the hysterics of Jonathon Franzen. Such is the profusion of witty perceptions, that it would seem Haddon built a set of characters expressly to carry out the truisms he had already gleaned from surveilling society. The novel's 61-year-old patriarch, David, before cooking dinner for a former colleague who is, unbeknownst to him, sleeping with his wife, 'spent the day shopping and making risotto in the time-honoured male way, removing all the utensils from the drawers and laying them out like surgical instruments, then decanting all the ingredients into small bowls to maximise the washing up'.

About halfway through the book, David's son, Jamie, sums up the book's focus when he identifies the 'rootless ache he always felt in business hotels and spare rooms, the smallness of your life when you took the props away'. Each of the characters is separated from a touchstone and must reconnect by different means. Haddon parodies himself along with these representatives of his countrymen by titling this collection of life-changing events as 'a spot of bother'.

The novel has its own spots of bother: Haddon frequently brings in an aside to elaborate a character point, but often he steps too far, leaving paragraphs disjointed. His intent is normally practical rather than poetic - to flesh out a character and their relationships - and perhaps he's endeavouring in building these rounded characters to prove his own point that men 'put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid'.

'Round Ireland with a Fridge' - Tony Hawks

It's a famous book, made huge by its unlikely premise: hitchhiking around the emerald isle with a bulky kitchen appliance. Author Tony Hawks is a comedian by trade and it is perhaps telling of his demeanour that he came to the journey by way of a bet; as in, somewhere between the ninth and tenth round of beers the gauntlet of 'bet you 100 quid you couldn't do it' was thrown down. Whether or not there's anything further to be derived about his character by the fact that said fridge cost more than the bet is something the reader can make up their own mind about.

The absurdity and perceived impossibility of his journey are assuaged somewhat by, firstly, the size of his fridge (think of the kind squeezed into a hotel cupboard) and, secondly, by his regular phone-ins to a morning radio show, which prompt some drivers to call him up and arrange to collect him from a pre-arranged spot. We've seen the emergence of 'flashpacking'; in the late 90s Hawks pioneered swishhiking (not to be confused with the far more effortful swisshiking - rather more bergs involved in the latter).

The book is certainly funny. In its initial stages, particularly, as Hawks describes preparations for the journey and reactions of his English countrymen, he can prompt snickering, snorting and the odd guffaw (a discussion with HRH Prince Charles is certainly worth a chuckle). His occasional musing about a religion or spiritual cause based on the philosophy of his quest and beliefs is at times both diverting and worth a few moments' cogitation. Further, there are moments of notable lyricism: 'With caution I stood by the boat's siderail and viewed the sea respectfully, a little confused by its jet black, inky colour and its refusal to reflect the blue sky above it.'

It's a fun and original story, told by someone confident in the art of engaging an audience with tales to get them laughing. On occasion, Hawks falls into the comedian's trap of milking a joke for too long, of going for one more laugh when he could have quit when ahead. Some recollections seem only to be in there for him to get a laugh, rather than to help flesh out detail of the trip. Given the genre, that's justified to an extent, but it's more forgiveable when those extra jokes are delivered with a little more panache. This next point isn't necessarily Hawks fault: the book is terribly edited. If a comma between a subject and its verb gets your hackles up do not attempt to read through any chapters of this book. It may be a personal sensitivity, but this reviewer also struggled to countenance Hawks's attitude to women. Too frequently he picks out a 'pretty' girl from a group as the one he 'fancies most'. His repartee after a successful encounter with a woman from New Zealand in Wexford is disrespectful to say the least.

It's important of course to keep in mind the book's genre and market. It falls into the category of travel writing where the idea of writing a book about one's experiences comes well after the crazy idea that led to the adventure in the first place. It's not a market craving travel literature, but instead laughter and enjoyment from another person's idea of fun. And to that end it meets its mark spot on: it is fun and diverting and it was a crazy idea, which begs further investigation from the reader to find out how it was done. Leave your prejudices and higher expectations at the contents page, and you're guaranteed an enjoyable read.

'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' - Marina Lewycka

Is this novel's title an accurate description of its contents? Yes and no. It does feature a character who is writing a book of the same name, and portions of that book are featured as he reads sections of his masterwork to his family. That family is Ukrainian, though the novel is set in England, where they have lived since fleeing the communist regime in the former Soviet Union.

The novel's title, if it were taken literally, would suggest a dry tome of technical explanations, perhaps even an indecipherable dissertation if it were in fact written in Ukrainian. Instead, this novel is especially warm, poignant and at moments quite funny. Its surface story is that of two middle-aged sisters, Nadia and Vera, dealing with their 84-year-old father deciding to marry a 36-year-old Ukrainian woman, Valentina, who is clearly on a misguided hunt for the untold riches she believes her 'westernised' husband to possess. There is a great deal of intercultural and intergender humour and plenty of absurdity in the story. Just as the title is a furphy to its contents, however, so is the superficial story only one layer, overlying its deeper concerns.

Nadia is the younger of the sisters by ten years, a 'Peace Time Baby', born in England after her family has fled. Her sister Vera is a 'War Baby' who endured both isolation from and internment with her parents during the German occupation. As Nadia and Vera re-establish their fraught relationship in an effort to thwart their money-grabbing stepmother, Nadia begins to probe the family history, to uncover the reasons for the rifts and sore points amongst them. Through this avenue, as well as via excerpts from the old man's tractor treatise, the reader is given an empathetic history of the Ukraine and the troubles it has experienced during and after World War II.

Of particular focus is the transition from communism to capitalism. This is dealt with amusingly through Valentina's assumptions about the free, capitalist wonderland of England (insisting on purchasing a 'prestigious' gas stove, rather than a 'peasant' electric cooker for example). The 'Short History of Tractors' puts the transition into a more economic context, relating capitalism and its availability of funds to over-expansion of agriculture, consequent damage to farming land, and the 1929 stockmarket crash. More philosophically, however, the effects of both systems are shown as we learn more about the family's history, of what they endured in the Ukraine, what still haunts them in their new home in England and what they feel capable of making of their lives.

If the content and themes sound a bit heavy and preachy, the style alleviates any notion of an academic slog. The book is very much a story, not a treatise, related using a large proportion of dialogue (with the rendition of the Ukranians' stilted English particularly effective). Valentina's shenanigans are frequently giggle-worthy and the main narrator, Nadia, elucidates the corollary affection and exasperation inherent in caring for an aging parent. Although there are serious themes - fraught family relationships, finances in despair, consequences of terrible conflict - the style remains decent and gentle. The narrative is broken several times a page with line-breaks, which can make it a little jerky when one expects the blank line to represent a break between scenes, rather than just an aside.

Lewycka's style neither trivialises the brutality of her character's history nor over-emphasises it: family squabbles, many of which are a product of war-time events, are dealt with in equal accord to international ones.

'The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' - Alexander McCall Smith

McCall Smith achieves a rare thing in modern literature: a writing style that is both intellectual and diverting. The Ladies' Detective Agency has moments of extraordinary, deadpan humour but also philosophises on the nature of what makes us happy and contented. Death and abuse are also encountered, but with reality rather than sensationalism. That reality is also applied to the imagery of Botswana, which threads through the novel as an extra character.

There is a notable rhythm to the words in the novel which allow the reader to hear them with the undulations of an African accent. There are also interesting perspective switches: the novel is primarily told through the eyes and thoughts of Mme Ramotswe but every so often, when necessary, a different character is given the first person, or the third person focus. This isn't cumbersome, rather it simply provides the reader with the imagery and information they need to fully appreciate the story. There is an insousiance to the chapter headings (for example, 'Mma Ramotswe Thinks about the Land while Driving her Tiny White Van to Francistown) that puts me in mind of A.A.Milne. Similarly, when discussing the novel with a friend, we came up with the word 'comfy' to describe the writing style: it is not only accessible, but particularly welcoming and comforting.

'31 Songs' - Nick Hornby

When you've set the benchmark for a modern genre, it seems reasonable to publish a book of your personal digressions on a topic integral to your novelistic style. In Nick Hornby's case, that topic is popular culture, or more specifically in this case, pop music. Here are 31 songs that mean more than just a bit, songs that have defined moments but, more than that, have stayed with Hornby over time and have often transformed to take on new meanings. His musical knowledge is aptly demonstrated. He is a man who listens on many levels, hearing the subtlety in pop music that one reads into literature or looks for in art.

Right from the start, this isn't a concept that is going to please everyone. In 'High Fidelity' each of Rob's Top 5 lists is laid out there in a fictional context: just like his record-shop mates the reader is free to criticise or nod sagely in agreement. Here though, Hornby is putting his favourites out in the real world. There's no fantasy or other characters to hide behind. And, if you have never had a relationship with a song that lasted longer than its three-and-a-half minute duration, then the book's appeal would be lost to you by the time you're halfway through the introduction.

If, however, your record collection has played a significant role in your emotional development, then there's always the problem of personal taste. I hit my first taste obstacle with just the third song of the book and my immediate response was, momentarily, to wonder how I could go further and trust the taste of a man publicly proclaiming his satisfaction with this particular songstress (granted, with only one specific song of hers). Such disagreements are inevitable, but are also in fact part of the point that Hornby is trying to make. These songs are about him: he is relating his inner self and experiences through what these songs mean to him, rather than using up his, his publisher's and the reader's time simply expounding on what he likes. It's not the choice of songs that are most relevant, it's what Hornby reveals about himself in describing why each song is included. That level of honesty and philosophy, combined with his music knowledge, make this a worthwhile exploration.

'On Chesil Beach', Ian McEwan

Much has been written about Ian McEwan's latest, published this year, principally that it is a) very short (in my version 166 pages), b) that it didn't win the Booker Prize and c) whether or not its premise and resolution are plausible.

Briefly, the novella commences with a virginal British couple in their early twenties, Edward and Florence, at a hotel in Dorset on their wedding night. It is 1962, 'a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible'. The book recounts how they met, touches on their families' backgrounds and returns between each digression to their awkward hotel suite. It is not a plot of action, rather a dual character study, irremovable from the time period. As Edward says, as they finally reach the pure white bed, the only things standing in their way are 'the tail end of religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all'.

The book is short on dialogue, long on description, characterisation and observation. With its length, it is best appreciated in a single sitting - set aside a time and go cover to cover, allowing a cohesive reading that gels the key events, telling background and unforeseen outcome.

Sex is of course a key theme of the novella, but it is played out around the main characters, rather than by them. An extraordinary paragraph on just the third page involves the Dorset flora in a dumbplay of consummation. Florence, as a violinist, is given her passionate outlet through performance. The bias of perspective in the novella falls to Edward, which I found a little isolating, until on second read I noticed more closely the language used to describe Florence's playing.

There is an enormous amount squeezed into these 160-odd pages: two lifetimes and an entire conservative national culture at its cusp before the sexual revolution. The sweep of emotions and concepts is contrasted with the sharpness of the couple's final conversation in Part Five. It's a dramatic change and I think that making the jump with the author is the hardest task for the reader. Previously the novel has relied almost entirely on observation; the majority of that in hindsight. Now we face a conversation where the participants say none of the things they mean, but inform the audience through their interior monologues of what their counterpart cannot know. This exchange is the early 1960s: an educated man and woman unable to express themselves about intimacies, when they can, and are expected to, comment on the Soviet Union or identify birds by their song.

'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time', Mark Haddon

Published in 2003, this book received very positive reviews from many sources, as well as the Whitbread Book of the Year (which disturbingly is now the Costa Book Award, as in the British coffee chain). It is principally an interior monologue of a 15-year-old boy with Aspergers Syndrome, Christopher Boone. The power of the book is in the factual way Christopher relates all of his story: from his genius level understanding of mathematics, his determination to solve the 'curious incident' of the title, and most strikingly the disintegration of his parents' relationship.

Conventionally society regards people with a mental disability as hindered in pursuing an ephemerally 'normal' life. Here however, entirely without preaching or didactic effort to educate, the people who aren't succeeding are the able-minded and able-bodied adults that Christopher encounters. In their version of the world everything is confused by emotions and expectations. In Christopher's as long as the different foods on his plate don't touch and he can avoid brown and yellow then life can progress quite adequately.

There are several provoking observations, which form the substance of the novel, rather than an intriguing story. I was most taken with the following digression on the notion of time:

"Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere...you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it...And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable time is not there...Because time is only the relationship between the way different thing change...and it isn't a fixed relationship."