How to be Both

by Ali Smith
This is a book in two halves, one half being about a modern day teenager who has recently lost her mother and the second about a fifteenth century fresco painter. The painter is real but the story is built from the very few fragments that we have. The stories are tenuously connected and I discovered afterwards that the book has been published in 2 versions with the stories placed in a different order in each. I was very frustrated reading the painters tale second as I kept wanting it to return to the other story. I wonder if I would have felt differently reading them the other way around. Now I will never know. Very well written but a frustrating read and an unsatisfactory ending for my tastes 7/10

Orfeo

by Richard Powers
The quirky story of Peter Els. At the time of the novel he is a 70 year old composer/retired music professor who in his kitchen has set up an amateur genetics laboratory. By a string of events this comes to the attention of homeland security and suddenly our hero is on the run. During the course of his running he reflects over his life and we see how two sides of his life have converged to produce his current predicament. Very amusing in places and  an interesting ending. Should have made the Booker shortlist. 9/10

The Long Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

It is unusual for me to start writing about a book before I have finished it but this book has evoked strong responses in me that have varied enormously.

The book follows an Australian surgeon, Dorrigo Evans, who joins the Australian army at the start of the war and is captured by the Japanese, ending up working on the Burma railway construction. Just before leaving for the war he has a short affair with his uncle's young wife, that has an impact on the rest of his life.

The book ranges back and forwards from the war years to the current day, following the fortunes of both Dorrigo and his fellow prisoners and their captors.

The writing is intense and at times almost poetic with short arresting sentences. At other times any beauty in the language gets overwhelmed by the sheer barbarity of what is being described. It is at this point I have to question whether this is gratuitous gore or something that is necessarily shocking to make us confront man's inhumanity. I don't know. It is certainly not an easy read and has left no options for a happy or hopeful ending.

With the last world war so far away for many of us, it is important that we do not forget the realities of it and the huge waste of humanity that results but is fiction the way to do this, or is it just another form of forgetting? I don't know. I will revisit my musings on this when I finish the book.

So I have finished and I have to say that I found the end of the book a little indulgent. Did we need a chapter on the execution by hanging of a Korean guard-especially one ending in a very clichéd mid –sentence halt as the trapdoor opened. Did the book really need our central character saving his family from the middle of an inferno in a forest fire? It was more Rambo than anything else.

The book has made the Booker shortlist but I would be disappointed if it were to win. 7/10