The Shore - Sara Taylor, The Scent of Dried Roses - Tim Lott, The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

Every so often you come across a new writer who is just such a damn good storyteller, always a good thing. I bought his after reading the Guardian review (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/18/the-shore-sara-taylor-review-kate-clanchy) - a great review, fair and well-written, enough to make me hit the search and buy button on my Kindle and start reading straightaway - such a strange feeling of decadence still,  seeing a book like that and then reading it within seconds - no more waiting, no more searching book shops - no more ordering of books that "should be in next week". The corollary is that there is so much  less browsing though actual bookshops, although I still do that. That's how I bought The Sleeping Giant - a book I wanted but I was seduced as well by the sheer size and weight and glory of its presentation - it felt good to heft it over to the counter even though I was paying quids and quids more than I would via Amazon. 

The Shore though, is housed in quiet electronic bytes and bits, the colourful cover  only really viewable on my Nexus, and I can't weigh it in my hand like I can a paper book - it's joined the other invisible unless I search books, books that do not sit on my bookshelves to be pulled out just when I catch sight of them, to be flicked through. That is a loss - there's a bit in Monique Roffey's With the Kisses of His Mouth where she describes a party that we were at, but it would be difficult to find - I'll have to search for the book, search through the pages - [perhaps use a search term like "Night of the Senses" then  trawl though all the false hits, and then at the end not a well-thumbed page, but a few arrangements of pixels on a screen. Which is not to mistake the form for the content - I still like reading books on a Kindle or anywhere, but there is that loss of some of the experience, the ability to wearily toss the book aside and see it waiting reproachfully for you to pick it up again. The other book that springs to mind is Tim Lott's  The Scent of Dried Roses: One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy which is a very well written account of his upbringing in the sixties and seventies in Ealing, his tales of past family that led to their Ealing home, his descent into depression and his slow climb out of it, and then the brick in the window, so to speak, of his mother' suicide just as he was recovering. I started reading his column in the Family section of the Guardian a little earlier and found I was enjoying his familiar, likable, warts-and-all confessional style, so bought the book. His writing lifts up several levels in the book - I enjoyed it for the sheer pleasure of his storytelling and prose, as well as the heady dose of nostalgia that it instilled. (Nostalgia for what I ask myself - I wouldn't want to go back in time any more than I am sure that he would, but it's that elegiac sense of a past that has been lost, which had a quieter less knowing feel to it). Now I'd love to be able to flick though the pages and flick through bits without all that harsh, clinical computery stuff. Well there's only one answer - I'll have to buy the paperback as well.

Karl Ove - Dancing in the dark, Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman, Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

Dancing in the Dark covers the late adolescent years, so it's a well mined area  of confessional literature by the likes of the wonderful Caitlin Moran (yes I think she is very good, for some of the same reasons I think Karl Ove is, and anyone who can't get along with Caitlin isn't going to get along with Karl Ove). Once again Karl Ove communicates the utter intensity of the ordinary, as well as the white hot intensity of the sexual obsession, for almost every adolescent boy, complicated by his instant premature ejaculation whenever he gets anywhere near his goal. There is one amazing fact about Karl Ove, and it can't be unconnected with his sexual problem: he says he never masturbated, ever. This is really really fucking weird - given his openness about everything else I guess it's true.  It's easier to read about Caitlin Moran, gaily fumbling along from orgasm to orgasm, than poor old Karl Ove - he never made it easy for himself.

Then when I'd finished, hurried though Dancing in the Dark, to get to read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, but then I felt this strange reluctance - supposing it wasn't up to the standard of all his previous novels, suppose the mood isn;t quite right? It was a strange feeling, but the book itself, its deep grey green cover (is it grey green? I can't remember), its black tinged pages, its weight, the thick feel of bound pages gave me this comforting sense that it would be alright. Why I don't know. It is a terrific book - need to say that right from the start - I am a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro anyway, but this is really good. It got mealy mouthed reviews from the likes of The New Yorker Magazine, among others,people who just don't get it, people who cannot, it seems, let their imagination soar as Ishiguro does. 

His prose is still, well, how do you describe it? - clear and ordinary but cumulatively devastating in its impact and emotional payload. Here he does allow himself some lovely forays into a slightly stilted "heightened" language, especially in the characters' speech.  In the end it's an almost unbearably poignant love story, set in the context of War and Peace, and what they do to us,  with all the power and depth combined with ambiguity that he is such a master stylist of. And he's yet another nail in the coffin of those who want to pigeonhole fantasy, science fiction, or any other genre, and say you can't produce literature using the tropes of any of those.