kris_mccracken's reviews
2529 reviews

A cutting exploration of the prudish, snobbish, self-important ways of a certain English class. It ends on an incredibly depressing note, but the story probes concepts of morality, virtue and the nature of prejudice. You'll enjoy disliking the characters.

I either enjoy books by Mr Dick, or they end up giving me a headache. File this one under 'headache'.

While there is something interesting going on here, the unrelenting paranoia soon becomes tiresome. The fact that much of the book amounts to muddled ramblings of a religious nature coupled with a haphazard political paranoia, it is hard to separate the work from the reality of the author's heavy amphetamine abuse and deteriorating mental state.

Give it a miss.

Long considered a classic in the genre, I found this one both enlightening and frustrating. It's constructed as three separate novelettes (the central one, "Baby is Three," was originally published in Galaxy) which together link up to tell a larger tale. This structure echoes the novel's theme: the creation and evolution of a Gestalt, a single being composed of disparate parts that are incomplete alone but together form a whole.

This is an idea that has its roots in psychiatry, and this is where my tension with the book emerged. The entire middle portion of the book is framed as a long psychiatric session, in which the Gestalt slowly, for the first time, achieves self-awareness. As such, the psycho-babble seems dated and jarred we me as a reader. The premise is sound enough, but I found the execution a little tedious.

This is something of a shame, as the central thesis is both worthy and profound. There is a real warmth and deep humanity not seen in many novels. For that alone, it is certainly worth reading. Ultimately, I read it as an observation of loneliness and social connection that is partially let down by a pedestrian style that tends to drag through with little indication of where everything is leading. In this sense, it’s more to be endured than enjoyed.

The latest novel from Ishiguro is a strange beast. Quite different from his earlier works - venturing as it does into an imagined England populated by ogres, malevolent sprites and the odd dragon - a few hundred years after the Roman departure, it also explores some of the author's common themes, namely that of memory and how it fades and gets suppressed and distorted, and the challenge for individuals to fully face the past.

For a book that has been critiqued by some (in my view, snobbish) commentators for straying too far into the realm of fantasy, I reckon that this is actually in many respects a brutally realistic novel. The fragility of the central relationship and the pain that comes with reconciling with past deeds and misdeeds ring all too true.

Indeed, far from being a tale of magical elves hiding pots of gold, at its heart this is a novel that explores collective memory, and how societies and cultures recover from past atrocities by forgetting. In choosing an imagined England during the Saxon expansion, Ishiguro has been able to sidestep the potential problems of choosing a more modern setting such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka or South Africa.

I really enjoyed this book, and would encourage all those unsure of whether to give it a go, to do so.

A pretty frank biography of the recently deceased novelist. It's amazing how thoroughly you get the sense of an incredibly selfish fellow Günter Grass clearly was. While it's no shock to hear about his ego (anyone who knows anything about the man, knows that), the sheer level of disregard that he showed for those closest to him is genuinely shocking. Perhaps it's the nature of a certain type of artists.

On that alone this is an interesting and worthwhile read.