Book Reviews: The Names of Things; Illywhacker; and Between the Bridge and the River
I’ve been reading several books lately and thought I would discuss some of them here.
Tonight I found The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert by Susan Brind Morrow tucked away in a box with old school things. I’d forgotten about it, but when I read it over again, I remembered why I’ve kept it, why I read it periodically. I do so becase something about the way the book is written, the way it plays with languages — Egyptian, hierogliphics, the Bible, the Koran, songs — inspires my writing. This is one of those books that I used to bring out at night to read. It’s a travel book about Egypt, a story about the author’s family, the author’s studies of “dead languages,” and has a bit of Egyptology and archeology excavations thrown in as well. (The author describes keeping a child’s arm on her desk, a bone found at a dig, and the coloring of it, how carefully it was preserved.
No wonder it appeals to me. I love playing with words in writing and this book is full of explanations of hieroglyphics as various animals, of storytelling as a memory aid. The author uses animals and colors quite a bit as descriptions, but the sentences are short. I don’t read poetry often, unless the words create images that I can understand, and while this is not a poetry book, it is a book that use poetic language. It’s a short book but one I return to. This is a book I remember searching for as an audio book, because it would sound good as a CD.
I also read Illywhacker by Peter Carey yesterday. I confess that I am glad I bought it second-hand and that it only cost a dollar. I will be getting rid of it shortly. I bought it because it was Australian, because it was long, and billed as a humorous adventure story about a con man. Since I’ve found that British, Australian, and Canadian novels seem to do this kind of story quite well, with longer blocks of description than are normally in American books, I plowed in with excitement. (Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts is an example of a recent Australian book I did enjoy. It is enormously long, and yes, it does have spots that drag, but it is an exciting, well-done story set in India, and the parts that are good are well-worth reading).
This book was not it. Yes, it had descriptions of animals, the Australian bush, life histories of people the central character (the con man Herbert Badgery) runs into, his son Charles, the animal charmer, etc. Normally I don’t mind background histories of charactors, even extensive ones, but in this book, we learn life histories of people met briefly and skip over significant points. For example, as a child Herbert Badgery runs away from his father (after pulling the first of a series of mean-spirited pranks on the man, possibly the only justified one in the book). When the story catches up with Badgery some chapters later, he has been adopted by a Chinese man, who attempts to instruct him in magic tricks (such as how to disappear). Along with the idea of charming animals and other magical references, this is one of the ideas in the book I like best (along with the fact that Badgery steals a magical book much later in the story). How these two things occur, however, I enjoyed less, because they did not make sense to me.
Badgery steals the book in a violent way that does somewhat have a motive, but he does other things in the book which do not, such as repeatedly waving or throwing poisonous snakes at various people for no good reason. I read the first 96 pages straight through, then skipped about the book thereafter. I would have been most interested, I think, in the parts where Badgery has children, and the fact that his son Charles attempts to copy his lying and trickery and tries to learn the magical disappearing trick. I loved the descriptions of Badgery’s various homemade houses, and I enjoyed this idea too, but the tragedy that happens as a result of the disappearing act did not phase me at all.
The reason is because until very late in the book (by which time I had lost interest, and skipped) Badgery’s children appear to factor very little in the story, despite the fact that their mother left them all. After the tragedy, we never know what happens to Badgery’s son — if Badgery is unhappy and traveling, who is taking care of his son right then? Who is taking care of his son later, when he steals the magical book? Does he think of these things?
Not at all, apparently. Instead, there are long stretches in the book with Badgery and various customers, other charactors, and a mother-in-law (who only returns once her daughter leaves Badgery, in order to take care of the children and for another reason, which is also incomprehensible to me). Since Badgery is a trickster, the fact that he does what he wants, when he wants does make logical sense — but it doesn’t work for me. I don’t find the book funny, I think the parts that might have been an excellent adventure story are not put to good use. It was a shame. I wanted to like this book, but by the end I wanted to know the ending, but didn’t really care what happened to any of the people in it.
I also read Craig Ferguson’s Between the Bridge and the River, and I wanted to like this book too. I like Craig Ferguson’s show and think he’s very funny. And while I admired the way the book was put together (various people introduced briefly, then thrown into various odd situations, including WWI,visitations from Carl Jung and other famous dead people, cross-dressing etc.) the only joke that made me laugh out loud involved a bed-wetting deterrent and electric blankets. The rest didn’t make me laugh. I’m not sure why.