Quarantine – Jim Crace

The OED, in its third definition for quarantine, gives ‘any period of forty days’ and in Croce’s book it refers to a period of that length traditionally spent in the biblical desert by seekers of truth, miracles or god.

Four such pilgrims are making their individual way to the mountain top, following a well-worn path to caves frequented for this purpose. Some way behind them a fifth, a young man from Galilee named Jesus, is also en route to the site where he will choose (as ever) a more difficult path, down a precipice to a more exposed cave, the better to test his resolve and prove his faith.

Already on the mountain is a dying merchant left in his tent, by the rest of the caravan whose business won’t wait, in the care of his much abused wife whose immediate task is to find and prepare his grave among the stony scrubland.

It is her absence that Jesus arrives and seeks alms at the tent. Finding only a fever-ridden man there he helps himself to a dab of water and as an afterthought spreads a little on the merchant’s face and lips while wishing him well and departing to begin his fast.

When the wife returns she finds her husband indeed well - a disappointment to her and not good news for the pilgrims as he immediately sets out to create profits from their needs and vulnerabilities. And yet he is haunted by the feverish memory of the blessing of the Galilean, an inaccessible presence down the precipice.

So the scene is set, and as the forty days count down, relationships within the thrown together group develop, with a shared purpose of survival and a growing belief in the mystic powers of the reclusive and slowly starving Jesus.

The prose is simple and powerful in its down to earth telling of the pilgrims’ plight in the unforgiving wilderness, which is the main narrative; Jesus and his spiritual quest are there, but peripherally – it is his effect on the group that is more central. And the merchant is most affected as he tries to reconcile this brush with God with a life so firmly based on Mammon.

It’s a very good book that examines how faith and belief stack up against more prosaic needs and motives; there is ambiguity, imagery a plenty, and allegorical references to unpick if you are so minded, but they don’t overwhelm the story which is economically covered in less than 250 pages.

One to be read and discussed; ideal fodder for reading groups.

I Am the Secret Footballer – Anon

Read as part of the sport reading journey

The secret footballer hides his (alleged) identity as a top flight player, ostensibly to protect himself from his fellow professionals, not to mention the managers, referees, media, agents etc. who he exposes in his revelations on the beautiful game.

His motivation appears to be to hit back at the industry that has stigmatised him with the marks of excess and hypocrisy and has lured him with fame and riches away from a more rounded and fulfilling life that he was, and remains, more than capable of attaining. It’s clearly also therapeutic to get it all out there on paper.

The inside story holds no great surprises to followers of the game, although some detail on the crazy financial sums earned and squandered was noteworthy, the subject being inexplicably tiptoed around by the otherwise intrusive press.

The writing is fine but the structure of the book, divided into chapters such as tactics, managers, money, agents, bad behaviour and the like, seems a bit arbitrary as he wanders off the subject quite readily as he recounts his anecdotes. I haven’t previously followed his pieces in The Guardian but I suspect the book recycles much of the material – but that is no bad thing if it is new to you.

If you follow premiership football it holds plenty of interest, and it has currency with this paperback having an additional chapter that takes it into the 2012-13 season; for the general reader however, it sheds little light on the human (as against celebrity) condition.

For me the book strengthens my disillusionment with the game at the highest levels which now is just a television programme and a commercial enterprise; for real sporting involvement I go to the non-league games to see people playing for the love of the game with supporters cheering on players they can relate to and interact with on a personal basis, cheering on their mates rather than some clay-footed hero who will become a villain as soon as he changes clubs for that extra million.

Too Much Happiness – Alice Munro

In this collection most of the ten stories portray women in a variety of familial situations – as wives and widows, as mothers and daughters, and as mistresses and divorcees – in a wide range of social contexts.

The tales are delivered in a measured, thoughtful prose that gently probes into the lives, thoughts and motivations of the protagonists, often gradually revealing past events that cast shadows over current lives.

While most stories eschew the traditional twist in the tail, and some fail to provide a resolution (perhaps it is old-fashioned to expect it), they all have an unpredictability that maintains interest throughout.

It was engaging but I was a little disappointed not to be wowed by holder of the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature, but that may say more about my tastes than her writing.

Last Man Down – Richard Picciotto

Richard ‘Pitch’ Picciotto was about to start a rare 9 to 5 shift as Commander of Battalion 11 of the Fire Department of New York on the fateful day of 11 September  2001, when the first plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. The resultant fire is not on his patch but he and his men are raring to go and help, and when the second plane hits the north tower he just gets in his fire chief’s car and heads on over to the disaster.

Amidst the understandable chaos at the WTC he collects a group of like-minded firemen and starts up one of the north tower staircases to aid the rescue of civilians and fight the fire.

Thirty-five floors up the mission changes when the unthinkable happens. They hear the deafening collapse of the adjacent south tower and it is now about getting back down and out before the north tower follows suit and brings down the seventy plus storeys above onto their heads.

The orderly retreat, picking up the lame and infirm civilian stragglers en route, gets only so far before, inevitably, the north tower goes and plunges Pitch and his men into dust filled hell-holes ‘fortunately’ preserved among the twisted metal and fractured concrete blocks. It’s dark and radio contact is non-existent, then sporadic, as he first waits for rescue then decides to look for an escape route.

The first-hand account is, has to be, gripping, and reading it 12 years after the event the scale of the physical damage is maybe easier to take in than it was immediately after the event when the sense of the human tragedy was overpowering. It is a very personal account that also reflects on the nature of the firefighter’s job - the danger, rewards and camaraderie – and its effect on the family.

Although writing with Daniel Paisner, the words that come out of the page are clearly Picciotto’s, in a no-nonsense, tell it how it is, style. It doesn’t give the complete story of 9/11 (he does not concern himself with the politics or the thousands of civilians killed on the upper floors whose bodies he does not even see in the wreckage) just the experiences that day of one fireman who survived against the odds, unlike the 343 others listed at the start of the book who did not.

Review of 2013

2013 was a successful year for Bibliodyssey with a blog posted every week. From the 48 titles reviewed the following are picked out as books of my year and are recommended (full review in bracketed month).

General Fiction:

When Will There Be Good News - Kate Atkinson (Aug)

Black Swan Green - David Mitchell (Sep)

Pure - Andrew Miller (Jul)

Care of Wooden Floors - Will Wiles (Jul)

Books for serious readers:

Headlong - Michael Frayn (Mar)

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Sep)

The Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson (May)

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (Oct)

Plus a top quality trilogy:

The Blackhouse (Mar); The Lewis Man (Oct); The Chessmen (Dec) - Peter May

Best sport book:

Seabiscuit - Laura Hillenbrand (Jan)

Nonfiction:

The Scramble for Africa - Thomas Pakenham (Dec)