The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

It seems to me that of late, it has become fashionable amongst the 'literati' to turn up their noses at F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby'. At least, amongst my friends studying English at university, a certain disdain for the novel has been more confidently voiced since Baz Lurhmann's film brought the novel to an even wider audience. As the public jumped eagerly onto the Gatsby bandwagon, my friends jumped off – and the novel that had been claimed as the favourite book of A-Level English students everywhere lost favour. The fashion magazines admittedly sort of missed the point, revelling in the excesses of the film which inspired Prada's extortionately expensive 'golden, crystal-laden' party gowns. Whether Fitzgerald would quite have been turning in his grave is up for debate, as the author was admittedly, like his narrator Nick, as much 'enchanted' as he was supposedly 'repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life' in The Jazz Age.

This is a kind of manifesto in support of 'The Great Gatsby'. Possibly not Fitzgerald's most refined work (contemporary critics described him as a "a wild child dashing aimlessly about his nursery, smashing toys and breaking windows") - but I like it for all its sentences dripping with description, Fitzgerald's famous lists overspilling each line with the burden of their excess, and for the obvious joy in each line as Fitzgerald wrote what he called 'the best American novel ever written' in a fabulously self-congratulatory way.

'The Great Gatsby' tends to read like a 300 page long quote, with turns of phrases that sit so well on the tongue that you can almost taste them: bitter when Gatsby realises what "a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass", or too sweet when, before kissing the girl of his dreams, he pauses to listen to the 'tuning fork that had been struck upon a star'. It's sad, especially when the reader begins to realise that the naïve and wildly mislead Gatsby, will not, like an overexcited puppy, let go of the rags of his dream.

If you can stomach an artificial world "redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes" then dive in - but Fitzgerald's lyrical prose is not for everyone. As for me, I'll be joining the hundreds who come and 'twinkle hilariously' on Gatsby's lawn :)

My Verdict: I really like it - despite the rolling eyes I'll get from book snobs!

Out of the Shelter - David Lodge

Out of the Shelter - David Lodge

I picked up 'Out of the Shelter' in my gorgeous local library, Manor House Gardens. The blurb promised that the protagonist Timmy, who grows up in London under the shadow of the Blitz, would undergo a life-changing rite of passage when his older sister Kath draws him into her "deliriously fast, furious and extravagant life" in occupied Heidelberg. I hoped the bildungsroman would be a sort of 'Catcher in the Rye' meets 'The Great Gatsby'...and wasn't completely disappointed.

The novel is not as glitzy or glamorous as billed. For Timothy, in full bloom as a painfully awkward adolescent, drinking five milkshakes in a row satisfies the inadequacy of his life back in a London ravaged by war and rationing - almost. Only the numerous clumsy encounters with pretty girls are a constant reminder of Timothy's more immediate feelings of lack.

 Relatively untouched by war, Heidelberg graciously provides a picturesque distraction from the damage and destruction caused by Allied bombing in Germany. Certainly, for the Americans who significantly set up base there, life is a ball. The novel excels in its creation of these careless bright young things, for whom of the horrors of war are an obscure fact rarely called to the forefront of consciousness. When Lodge does bring these horrors to our attention, they leave reader all the more shocked and shaken.

I studied World War history over and over again at school, so the historical events outlined in the novel were accurate and familiar. However, like Timothy's drawings of Heidelberg, Lodge attentively sketches in a delicately detailed portrait of the immediate post-war period rarely touched upon.

I guessed at the revelatory ending, but the emotional power of the final pages where Kath reflects on her experiences was not dampened nonetheless. I felt that the epilogue by Lodge, explaining away the book's poor commercial success with the terrible editing of the first edition was a bit disappointing and unnecessary. It was interesting to learn which parts of the novel were autobiographical.

Enjoyable. A cocktail of easy reading, laced with sadness and garnished with a sprig of cringing humour.

My verdict: I preferred Lodge's Literary Criticism in 'The Art of Fiction' but this is worth a read! 

The Life of Pi - Yann Martel

The Life of Pi - Yann Martel

When it comes to celebrating Yann Martel's visionary novel, I am a little late to the party. The novel first arrived and hovered at the periphery of my awareness when I was quite young, as one of the many uncorrected book proofs that filtered through the offices of my Grandma's bookshop and ended up in our living room. Like Lewyka's 'A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine' which lay beside it, the title was sufficiently kooky for the plot to prove elusive at first glance - I only realised later that I declined to read the novel because my pre-teen self had assumed it was about Maths. (Maths and I do not get on.)

The book deserves all the praise that it was rightly given, winning the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and being adapted into Ang Lee's stunning miracle of a film in 2012, for which he won Best Director. 

I saw the film first, and then read the book - a mortal sin, I know - and my next admission is even more disgraceful...that I may have preferred the film. The novel is beautiful and heartfelt, and Piscine Molitor Patel proves an immensely likeable narrator of his own story. The sufferings of Pi's animal companions are painful to read, as was the descriptions of Pi's loneliness and debasement. Strangely absent though was my emotion, and I think Pi's, at the loss of his family. I believe I felt more attached to Richard Parker, the peculiarly named tiger who is shipwrecked along with the protagonist when the Molitor family pack up their corner of a lush, resplendent India and set sail with their menagerie for the austerely sensible Canada. In retrospect, and for those who know the story, however, this is surely Martel's point. The Pi missing from the movie is one who muses for pages about the meaning of life, the human qualities of his beloved animals, and who prays unwaveringly to the many gods who guide and prosper his story. 

Towards the end of the book, perhaps coloured by my expectant eagerness to reach the philosophic conclusion, I felt my attention tailing off. The episode on Pi's carnivorous island was far more unsettling in the film, where phosphorescent light, 3D glasses and stunning visual effects outshone Martel's earnest prose. 

The ending leaves you with your heart in your throat - this is definitely book club fodder; a novel you want to discuss. 'A story to make you believe in God', Barack Obama himself wrote directly to Martel, calling the book "an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling". Impressively put, but the novel's ending did leave me feeling that the religious message had become a little saccharine, suggesting that Pi's faith in his gods is the equivalent of choosing an improbably romantic but more palatable yarn over cold truth. For the non-religious, this may be the case - but the adherents of Christianity, Hinduism and Islam would be quick to disagree.

In all, a treasure. 'The Life of Pi' is practically faultless. Who would have thought that Richard Parker could take up a place in my heart as he did in Pi's?!

Verdict: I loved 'The Life of Pi'! - but watch the film too!

This is hilarious! Check out "The LIE of Pi" >> http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/removing-a-single-letter-from-the-title-of-famous-books-some