Re-Reading: Jemima J by Jane Green

Libby

One thing I'll say for Jemima J is at least she's not as much of an insufferable douche noodle as Libby is. That doesn't mean I like Jemima, our morbidly obese eponymous heroine. I don't think her creator, Jane Green, thinks much of her either, and that's because Jane Green seems to hate women. Fat women, confident women, women over forty, young women, bitchy women, smart women, stupid women. None of them are safe from Green's judgemental snark cannon. I started to think that Green might actually be a lonely fat, angry Red Piller who was rejected at school by girls, not because (as he misguidedly thinks) they find his physical appearance replusive and should get to know the 'real him', but because he's actually just not a very nice person.

Jemima lives with flatmates Sophie and Lisa, who are right out of The Brother's Grimm. Beautiful, stupid and bitchy I am not sure what purpose the two serve to the story other than to try and make us feel sorry for Jemima.
Jemima's eating issues and weight problems are never really explored. She's fat and she eats alot. She has troublesome relatonship with her critical and selfish mother, but then who doesn't have mummy or daddy issues? We never know why Jemima is the way she is, which misses a huge opportunity for Green to explore our issues with food and body image in a sensible way instead of ham-fistedly trying to imagine what it might be like to be fat.

 I don't think Green has ever met a fat person - Jemima is about 100Ilbs overweight, or 7 stone. Let's assume that the average healthy weight, 5"7 British female weights what - 9 / 9.5 stone? That would put Jemima at 16 stone. Jemima manages to lose 7 stone in THREE MONTHS. THREE MONTHS. With no 'loose skin' because apparently over excersising to the point of exhaustion means you don't have any loose skin when you loose that much weight that quickly.  This is such a fundamentally dangerous and unhealthy message to send to younger readers - that they can easily lose that much weight that quickly with no health consequences whatsoever it made me want to throw this stupid book at a wall. It's hinted ever so slightly that people are worried about Jemima's miraculous weight loss - her PT for example expresses concern but does little to intervene and make sure Jemima isn't headed down the opposite road of her eating disorders. Jemima also manages to achieve a six pack and muscular thighs in this time, which is so fucking laughable I almost cried.

By the time she's lost weight, she's reinvented herself as 'JJ' and has started an internet romance with hot Californian Brad, despite being in love with her handsome colleague, Ben. Sadly Ben only sees Jemima as a friend and nothing more.

JJ works on local paper the Kilburn Herald with bitchy Geraldine and handsome Ben. The three of them form a closeknit friendship in which they never hang out with each other or phone each other. After Ben leaves the Herald for the bright lights of showbiz TV, JJ flies out to LA to meet Brad, even though she's afraid he might have catfished her (though this book was written in the days before the term was invented).

Brad turns out to be as hot as his photos and for a week Brad and JJ fuck, exercise, eat salad, fuck, exercise, eat salad, fuck, exercise, eat salad, fuck, exercise, eat salad. Oh and they go to a coffee shop 'calling itself Starbucks'. Brad of course, is not all he seems and it turns out that he's actually in a relationship with his fat assistant Jenny. He was only using JJ for her looks, because a man of his stature (he owns a gym) needs a hot girlfriend. This is the plot twist. Yes, really. Man fancies fat woman shocker.

It was pretty obvious that Brad was going to have a dark secret, and I should have seen it coming a mile off when Jenny was so openly hostile to JJ, but I didn't. After I'd got to this bit in the book, I read it again to make sure I hadn't hallucinated that bit. Why would a gym owner need a hot girlfriend? Why is it weird that he has a 'fetish' for fat women? (there goes the snark cannon again) it just didn't make any sense.

Round about the time JJ has found out Brad has a fat festish, Ben is flying out to LA to interview a movie star, who of course is goregeous but is into physcobabble bullshit and thus stops being alluring to Ben. While he's in LA, he keeps seeing this beautuful blonde woman and can't stop thinking about her. He finds out that Jemima is in LA and calls her.

When they meet, he doesn't recognise his old friend - he's just sp pleased to have randomly bumped into the hot blonde he kept seeing around town. JJ's heartbroken, but agrees to meet up with Ben again and reveals that she's really his old friend.

The fact that Ben only fancies Jemima now she looks how she does was so, so disappointing. And it made me hate Ben but it made me hate Jemima more for falling for that bullshit. Green tries to salvage this in the epilogue, saying that Jemima is now 'a healthy size 12 and Mrs Ben Williams' but it's too little too late. The message that if YOU change YOU'LL get the man makes me furious, furious, furious.  Green also bangs on about the power of never giving up on your dreams and what a small, narrow world it is if by great things you mean losing weight and getting the man of your dreams who wouldn't look twice at you when you were fat.

Fuck you, Jane Green. Fuck you.

A Ghost Story Review (spoiler alert)

“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.” Virginia Woolf,  A Haunted House

A few minutes into David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, couple C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara) are woken in the early hours by a loud crash coming from the living-room of their one-storey, middle-of-nowhere house. They go to investigate and find….. nothing. So begins a circular, peculiar story that moves back and forth through time.

C dies on what could be the next morning, or the next month, we don’t know, because time is weirdly elastic in this film. C, dressed in a child’s notion of a Halloween ghost, rises from his mortuary gurney and returns to the house he shares with M. He observes M grieve, meet a new man and eventually move out. He meets another bed-sheeted ghost, who’s haunting the house opposite while they wait for someone, but can’t remember who.

Long after M has left the house, C continues to haunt it and it’s could be previous or could be following tenants. Even after the house is demolished and replaced with a luxury office block, and is surrounded by a neon city-scape, he stays there.

 On the surface, the premise of this film is silly and a bit pretentious. Who wants to spend a couple of hours watching Casey Affleck wandering around draped in a bed-sheet?

To me this was a film about two things. 1) Our place in the world and the meaningless of our existence in the grand scheme of things and 2) The nature of what we perceive as endings.

While C can wander back and forth through time, he is perpetually stuck in the place he can’t explain his attachment to, even when he’s alive and M is asking him if they can move to the city. When M asks C why his pull to the house is so strong, he says, ‘I don’t know. History?’  We see some fragments of his home’s sometimes awful history as C time travels to the years before the house was built.

We can project our own feelings onto C – our fears that we’re going to die and be forgotten, that we’ll die without ever doing all the things we had planned to do, that we’re running out of time, that the time we have left seems to be moving forward at an alarmingly accelerated pace. M’s fear manifests itself in her habit of leaving little notes hidden in all the places she lives, explaining that if she ever goes back, she’ll find a piece of herself there waiting. The note she leaves in the house she shares with C is what keeps him stuck there, and is key to his eventual moving on.

 There’s strong chemistry between Affleck and Mara and they convince as an on-screen couple. There’s one scene where we watch them from above, as they lie in bed and kiss, which feels kind of  voyeuristic. This scene ties in well when we later learn that C has also been watching all the time, could have been there with us at that moment too. We are also allowed to observe the couple’s relationship as it starts to crumble under the weight of their different expectations.

Rooney Mara (M) and Casey Affleck (C)

There are moments where good old haunted house tropes are used – flickering lights, books flying off shelves, cupboard doors being flung open, doors being slammed shut. I think this was probably because C was doing what he thought a ghost should be doing when they’re haunting houses; these moments seemed to come when he was upset or distressed (like when he sees M kissing her new boyfriend.) But because time is so oddly fluid in this film, he can’t even make the poltergeist style activity happen when he wants it to – the books fly the shelves too late to scare off M’s new boyfriend.

I found the idea of M perpetually haunting a place he can’t escape from overwhelmingly sad, but it’s a theme that’s at the core of this film; our refusal to let go of things, people, places, meaningless stuff, and memories. It’s also about what happens after we die, to those that we leave behind. Everything else just goes on, without you, until they end, too.

I am not an aspect ratio / camera technique buff, so I am not going to use any technical terms here. The film is shot in a way that makes it look like an old home movie, or Polaroid photo – the kind of effect that we’d use filters on phones to achieve. Because the story is told from C’s point of view, we can only really see what he can see, or how he’d see it. It’s beautifully shot, though, with long distance tracking shots and loooong one-take static shots (there’s a pie-eating scene that feels a bit like one of those extended Family Guy jokes -  I’m pretty sure it’s going to divide audiences into ‘I get this’ and ‘what the fuck am I watching?’)

The music is just brilliant, and really fits the mood of the whole film – it’s atmospheric, creepy, sad and at times uplifting.  

A Ghost Story isn’t going to be everyone’s thing at all. If you’re expecting a straight up chilly ghost story, you’ll be disappointed. If you like your films a little bit weird and a little bit unsettling, but ultimately thought-provoking, it will be for you.

Kind of wish I hadn’t watched it on my birthday, though.

Score: 3.5/5 (I’ve moved off a /10 rating!)

Dishonourable mention: Casey Affleck’s legal troubles. Don’t think about that too much, or it will spoil this film for you. 

It 2017 review and comparison (contains spoilers)

THERE's TWO THINGS that I’m going to have to mention reviewing this film. The first is the 1986 Stephen King mega-novel and the second is the 1990 mini-series adaptation, both of the same name.

I read the book 15+ years ago, so there won’t be many comparisons to that here. After seeing the 2017 remake, I dug out my copy of the mini-series and it’s on as I write this. For the rest of the review, I’ll refer to the new film as It 2017 and the mini-series as It 1990.

There follows a brief plot synopsis:

All three versions are set in Derry, Maine. Stephen King fans will be very familiar with Derry (and the fictional town of Castle Rock) as these are two places that appear over and over again in his work.

A group of young teenage misfits, calling themselves ‘The Loser Club’ have to band together to defeat a fear-eating supernatural entity whose favourite visual representation in the real world is that of Pennywise the dancing clown, who has a mouthful of supernumerary razor sharp teeth. Here's the thing, though...the entity can manifest itself as anything at all, anything that you’re frightened of.

The Loser Club

The Losers Club: Eddie, Bill, Mike, Stan, Ben, Beverly and Richie

Bill : is struggling to get over his guilt over the death of his little brother Georgie. He let Georgie go out and play by himself when he was supposed to be looking after him. His obsession with finding out what happened to Georgie alienates him from his father, who cannot hide his anger and disappointment towards Bill. In the 1990 version, we meet his mother. She does not appear in the 2017 version.

Ben :  is new to town. He’s fat (though not really by 2017’s standards) he’s fascinated by local history and it’s him that’s worked out something really bad happens in the town every 27 years. We don’t know too much about his home life.

Richie: is the comedian of the group, and provides light relief. He also does a marvellous line in filthy jokes. Again, we don’t know too much about his home life and have to assume that his parents are often absent and/or neglectful.

Eddie: is an asthmatic germophobe with a controlling mother. He’s often very anxious and easily wound up. His mother is morbidly obese and spends the day watching television game shows.

Stan: is the voice of reason. We don’t actually see too much of Stan’s backstory, other than his bar mitzvah is coming up and he hasn’t studied for it. Oh, and he’s haunted by a painting of a faceless flute player.

Mike: is an orphan in this version (not in the 1990 one) He’s black, so that automatically outcasts him and makes him the focus of negative attention from Henry Bowers and his sidekicks. He works for the family meatpacking business, a job he struggles with because he can’t bear to slaughter the animals.

Beverly:  is the only girl in the group. She is  the victim off false rumours about her promiscuity. Her dad is sexually abusive, and this is made far more explicit here than it is in 1990 version.

The 1990 version begins with Mike realising that ‘It’ has returned to Derry after a young girl goes missing. Mike phones Bill, and we have a fade-out flashback flash-back to what happened to Georgie in the summer of 1960.

Each version handles Georgie’s death very differently, though what actually happens is identical. The paper boat Georgie and Bill make together is swept into a storm drain. Waiting in the drain is Pennywise. It 1990 gets this scene out of the way quickly – it’s there purely to introduce Pennywise to the audience. It’s also oddly accompanied with weirdly jolly plinky-plonky music. It 2017 spends much longer setting up, firstly in establishing the sweet, close relationship between the two brothers and secondly in holding tension for what’s to come next. We know what’s going to happen to Georgie, and when it does, it’s brutal. His interaction with Pennywise is much longer, and it feels much, much more uncomfortable; Pennywise has water running in and out of his mouth. And he just…lets it run. He doesn’t wipe his mouth or lick his lips. I found that more unsettling than his bright, bright blue eyes. This is an alpha predator on the hunt and his focus on getting Georgie is absolute.

'Hiya Georgie!'

Pennywise is played by Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård, and he’s pretty fucking scary. He has a child-like quality to him, but because he’s obviously very tall, his physicality, the sheer size of him over that of the kids alone, makes him frightening. The way he moves is freaky; his slightly off-kilter eyes are freaky; his sly little smile is freaky; even his grubby, Victorian vaudeville era costume is damned creepy.

Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise

It 2017 dispenses with the adult sections of the narrative altogether, staying with the children first in  the autumn of 1988 when Georgie dies, and then in the summer 1989,  instead of time hopping back and forth like the novel and It 1990 does. This is actually a pretty good way to handle the bloated source material because it nicely lines up part two, and means that this part of the story can fully focus on the kids and their lives in 1989.

The child actors in It 2017 are all superb, and totally believable. There is not one dud performance (and it does feel mean to slate a kid’s acting) Richie, Eddie and Ben provide the comic relief from what would otherwise be a relentless misery fest. And they talk like kids really do; they swear, they take the piss, they tell sexually explicit jokes. Their friendship feels very real. The only girl in the group Beverly, seems older, taller, bigger and more mature than the boys and that’s because in real life, she would be. We first meet 2017 Beverly hiding (unsuccessfully) in the loos from the school bullies. Beverly is actually one of the most complex, and well-drawn characters in this film. She has an utterly miserable home life, but her ‘public’ face is one of sass and bravado.

Each child is facing their own personal fear (and this is what Pennywise manifests as) Beating demons is a reoccurring theme in King’s work. IT 2017 knows this, and puts this theme at the heart of the film. This actually ties in nicely with the coming of age feel that the film also has, and the idea that our childhood fears may always haunt us. I read, watched and listened to other reviews, and it didn’t surprise me to hear comparisons of It 2017 to films like The Goonies and that isn't a bad thing at all. There is an element of adventure to this film too, and it doesn't feel out of place. 

Like with a lot of King’s novels, there are plenty of Easter eggs to be found. Eddie wears a t-shirt that has a picture of a car with eyes and teeth on it (Christine), Beverly’s bathroom scene recalls both Carrie and The Shining. The actor playing vile bully Henry Bowers has more than a passing resemblance to the late River Phoenix, who starred in another Stephen King adaptation, Stand By Me. One of the boys calls Beverly ‘Molly Ringwald’ which is funny because she looks just like 80’s Molly Ringwald (though that joke went over ¾ of the audience’s heads in my showing.) When TVs are playing in the background in scenes, you can hear the audio talk about playing in sewers with clowns. A cinema is showing A Nightmare on Elm Street 5.

 The ‘deadlights’ from the novel don’t appear until the end of the film, but I was so pleased they did. In the car on the way home, I said to my friend, ‘they did the deadlights!! THE DEADLIGHTS!!!’

Eddie's Christine inspired t-shirt

With the exception of Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise, IT 2017 is superior to IT 1990 in pretty much every way. It’s unnecessary to compare Curry and Skarsgård, because they are both so different and frightening in their own ways. That said I do prefer Skarsgård’s interpretation.

 Not one scene is wasted and each one contributes to keeping the plot moving along nicely. You can’t root for characters you don’t care about, but we feel like we’re part of the Loser Club, so we root for them every step of the way. There are moments in this film that are heart-breaking – Bill’s confrontation with his dad in the garage feels so painfully real, it kind of hurts to watch. That said, the film is also actually very, very funny with a good few laugh out loud moments.

For those of us that came of age in the early 1990s, this film will feel especially nostalgic – we can remember the late 80’s elements of the film – the faulty Casio calculator watch that goes off at weird times, the huge unflattering NHS style glasses, shell suits, analogue TV, beat em’ up arcade games – and we can also remember the first time we watched It 1990.

My only issue with the film was the amount of CGI used. It’s all pretty seamless, so it’s not an issue with quality, but more that some of the scenes were scary enough without all the extra bows and there were some genuine ‘hide behind you hands’ frights.  I went for dinner after the film, and walking alone up two flights of stairs to the restaurant toilets spooked me. And that to me is when a scary film has done its job well. When I’m thinking about it the next day, and well into the next week. 

Scores on the doors:

9/10. 

Dishonourable mention:

That scene from the book is cut from both screen adaptations and thank fuck it is. It’s way too twisted, even for me. Don’t know what scene I mean? Read the book, friends. Read the book. 

Dr Zzzzzz (what I read on my holidays)

Back in December, on beautiful Thai islands, I read two books.

The first was Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, read on sitting on the beach in between paddles in the sea and naps in the hammock on the balcony.  The second was Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, read pretty much on Christmas and Boxing Day, nursing an almighty hangover.   

 Doctor Sleep is the follow up to 1977’s The Shining, which I first read in the early 90s, on holiday in Cornwall. I remember that it was blazing hot that year, but I was there in the snow bound Overlook Hotel with little Danny Torrance and his insane dad. Jack Nicholson was on the cover – (an illustration of that famous Here’s Johnny scene from the Stanley Kubrick movie. In that scene, Shelley Duvall’s terror seems so real I have to watch it from between my fingers) I LOVED The Shining. I love the movie version, too, and rank it in my Top 5, even though it takes serious liberties with the original source material.

I loved how Stephen King was able to make fictional characters so real and so believable, so well-drawn and fleshed out they could be people you know. I loved the spooky twin girls and Dick Halloran and how feisty Wendy was. I loved the whole back story of Jack’s alcoholism and the dark history of the Overlook.

Doctor Sleep finds Danny (now Dan) Torrance some 35 years later. He’s a piss-head, just like his dad, and we come into his life as he’s ‘hitting bottom’. The first chapter of the book is classic SK to me, no messing around, pulling you right into the story.   Danny wakes up in a strange place with a strange woman, and he behaves appallingly. 

Soon he finds himself with an Al Anon mentor, who sets him on the straight path. This is where Dan’s story gets a bit dull. I would have liked to have followed him a little more as a boy, teenager and young man, other than the snippets that King gives us. 

 Once he’s in recovery, he becomes a very one dimensional character, and becomes so perfect and saintly, it’s irritating. He also does not speak like someone in their late 30s/ early 40s would, coming across as much older. Maybe this is because I am an immature late 30-something, but the way he spoke just didn’t ring true. I didn't really feel Dan as a fully formed character. King is very, very good at writing children, and perhaps I couldn't get to grips with 'adult Dan' because I remembered   'child Danny' so vividly. 

Dan has found himself work in a hospice, where he has earned the name ‘Doctor Sleep’ because of his ability to help the dying cross to the other side.

Meanwhile, across town, there’s Abra, a girl with remarkable shining powers. Over the course of ten or so years, she gets in touch with Dan via their ‘shine’, until they meet in person. Stephen King could have held back a bit on the internet / grooming aspect of their meeting, but it’s referred to repeatedly and made me feel uncomfortable. Sure, Dan is 38 or so, and Abra is 12, and Dan is so obviously not a sexual predator, but referring to Abra’s ‘long legs’ and ‘masses of blonde hair’ and then inserting that he’s worried about being thought of as a paedo was just a bit confusing.  I wasn’t sure if Abra was supposed to have a bit of a crush on Dan or not.

We meet the True Knot, a group of travelling ancient vampires, who feed off the ‘steam’ that shining children expel when they die. They discover Abra, and decide that they must have her.

We are introduced to Andi, a vulnerable young woman who was abused by her father for many years. She also has a remarkable talent, but sadly, Andi and her talent are discarded very early on. SK only picks up on Andi in the book’s closing chapters, which is a great shame, because she is by far one of the most interesting characters in the whole novel.

Abra is so powerful we feel no fear for her in her final show down with the True Knot. The ending feels rushed and hashed together. This is a common problem with Stephen King books – I feel that he writes himself into corners he can’t get out of and this is a prime example.

I was so disappointed with this book, especially as I’d chosen to lug it in my suitcase, weight that wasn’t really needed. I’m a long term SK fan. Saving this book for my trip was a bit of a let-down…I’m sorry, Steve. I still love you, but boy you better make it up to me.

Beyond Black was a different matter. Morbidly obese spiritual medium Alison tours the Home Counties with her bitchy assistant Collette. Alison is genuinely physic, unlike her tarot card reading colleagues. But she is also literally haunted by her past, in particular the foul-mouthed, perverted spirt guide Morris.

This book is so creepy it makes you feel a bit queasy. The descriptions of Morris and his ghostie mates sliding behind walls and hiding in pipes feel as sinister as they sound.

Morris is mates with a few other dead men, and as the story progresses, their link to Alison and her horrific past becomes clear. Hilary Mantel is very skilled at ‘showing, not telling’ and it’s largely left up to the reader to piece her awful history together, though it’s also fairly clear why Morris and his mates have sought her out and continue to taunt her.

Other departed souls visit her, mostly those that don’t understand that they are dead and are looking for their long lost friends.

No, it’s not like The Sixth Sense, even though Alison does see dead people. I really liked Alison’s charlatan medium friends, but hated Collette – she was a total dick and really irritating. The story stayed with me for a long time after I’d finished it – perhaps reading it in a foreign country, suffering from jet-lag added to the strangeness of it. Only two criticisms; it was a bit too long and I didn’t really understand what Mantel was trying to say and what it all meant. Perhaps that we are all haunted by our pasts, in one way or the other, (which kind of ties in nicely with Danny Torrance.)

Maybe, as has been said of David Lynch’s work, it might not mean anything at all.

Blog Bonus Round: (BING!) 

I quite enjoy casting the film versions of books I'm reading. I decided that adult Dan could be nicely played by Jake Gyllenhaal (yeah, yeah, I know he looks nothing like Danny Lloyd, and he's a few years too young, but I think he carries off that vulnerable / potentially dangerous thing quite well)

This is going to require Danny Torrance's eyes to change colour....

Aaand....Chloe Grace Moretz as Abra (she's already played Carrie White in 2013's remake...)

Have you read Doctor Sleep or Beyond Black? Who would you cast? 

Review - 'A Little Life' Hanya Yanagihara - UPDATE

This review comes about a year too late, but here we go anyway. Warning – contains mega spoilers.

Back in March and faced with almost 2 days of non-stop travel, I thought, ‘I need a big book, one of those massive, 700+ page jobs, that will see me through all those tedious hours of waiting for check-ins, waiting to board and the actual flight,’

I chose Hanya Yanagihara’s Man-Booker prize short-listed novel A Little Life, mostly because I had heard so much about it, and how amazing it was.

US edition - the cover photo sums up this review

UK edition cover

The novel follows four twenty-something New York friends, Jude, JB, Malcom and Willem over a period of some 30 odd, curiously timeless years. (there’s mobile phones and computers, but no social media, 9/11 or world politics.)

 At first, I struggled to separate which character was which, and this isn’t helped by Yanagihara (who I will refer to from now on as ‘HY’) playing the pronoun game and starting each chapter with ‘he’ instead of the narrating character’s name.

As for the first 50 or so pages, the four boys were so indistinguishable to me, I found myself flipping back over what I had just read, making notes so I could keep track.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Jude is the character HY has decided to focus on. Poor Jude; not even an Eastender’s character is put through the mill as much as he is. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, he’s taken into a monastery where the monks sexually and physically abuse him for years.

All except for kindly Brother Luke, who love-bombs Jude with encouragement and affection, providing him with a safe place to escape and just be a little boy. Because HY is from the ‘tell’ not ‘show’ school of writing, Brother Luke’s grooming is clear to the reader from the start of their ‘friendship’, and when Brother Luke suggests to a blindly willing Jude that they run away together to build a house in the woods, my heart sank.

Following his time with Brother Luke, which is so unrelentingly grimy I had to stop reading to gather myself and make a comforting cup of tea, Jude’s story gets progressively darker and more twisted, from the home he’s in during his early adolescence, to the truckers he meets on the road, to the sinister doctor he encounters in a service station bathroom, to the bullying, violent, lover he thinks he deserves, Jude's life is a non-stop parade of misery. 

Even after he’s adopted as an adult by Harold and his wife Julia, and meets doctor, Andy, there’s no happiness for Jude.  He is damaged, as you would be if you’d been through what he has been through. He cuts himself, he can’t stand sex or to be touched. Yet he’s also brilliant at absolutely everything he does; cooking, singing, playing the piano, gardening, in his stellar career as a lawyer.

And this is one of the issues among the many that I have with this novel. All of the four friends are wildly successful in their chosen fields; Willem becomes a Hollywood actor, winning Oscars and working with acclaimed directors; JB becomes a famous artist despite only painting portraits of his friends, and Malcolm becomes a famous architect. None of them end up quitting their dreams to get a job in Carpet Right or working in a call centre selling home insurance; none of them simply settle down and have a couple of kids and wash the car on a Sunday (I guess because that would be boring.)

JB and Malcolm’s stories eventually fade so much into the background, you wonder why HY included them in the first place, and then you realise; it’s so they can stand around saying, ‘I’m sorry’ (this book clocks up more ‘I’m sorries’ than 50 Shades does ‘Holy Craps!’) and telling Jude how amazing he is and how much they love him.

The amount of shit the three friends, Andy and Harold tolerate from Jude exasperated me. They seemed to give him so much time, such unquestioning, unconditional understanding and loyalty, and he never once gives it back. He lies to them, he tells them nothing about himself, he gives nothing away, he’s stubborn, and he treats them like shit.

In part, you can tell yourself that this is because this is who Jude is, a person who does not believe that they are worthy of being loved, but I found it amazing that his friends, who he treats so poorly for so long, would stick by him, for a massive 30 plus years.  They don’t know anything about the abuse he went though as a child, so they don’t even have the information to decide, ‘this is why Jude is why he is.’ The only knowledge they have of Jude's past is that he had a life-altering accident that disabled him, but even the details of this are hidden from them, and the reader, until towards the end of the book. 

Andy is perpetually, literally, putting Jude back together again, over and over again, stitching wounds and setting bones, asking the slimmest of questions and accepting the scantiest of answers. It drove me mad that Andy’s character was a doctor, and it felt like he was only there to provide Jude with 24/7 healthcare without asking any awkward questions. In short, being the total opposite of what every decent doctor would do, staying quiet when he should be talking, doing nothing when he has a duty to his patient to take action.

There’s actually little evidence of Jude’s amazingness, beyond his ability to survive the most awful of abuses, bake excellent cakes and be brilliant at everything he turns his hand to.

Jude is destined to spend the entire novel hating himself, feeling dirty, cutting himself so badly he almost dies, and surviving two suicide attempts.

I really, really, wanted to Jude to finally decide he was worthy of getting help and realise that he was loved and nothing that happened to him was his fault. I really wanted him to be more than his abuse, but HY was never going to let that happen.

Not much of Jude’s story really rang true for me. He didn’t need to have so much abuse thrown at him to be damaged, and his damage did not need to make up the totality of his character.

I would question how a child who grew up in ‘care’ and without the nurture and solid foundations of a healthy mother/child relationship could slide so easily into a successful career and into close friendships. The truth is, Jude doesn’t. His friendships are as shallow and one-sided as you’d expect from a child who never really learned how to interact with other children, yet this isn’t an area the author chooses to explore at all.  

Jude also displays zero curiosity about who his parents might have been / are, and in fact I am not sure it’s ever even mentioned with the exception of it not being clear what his racial heritage is (we know it’s mixed, and that’s the extent of it.)

Jude’s relationship with an abusive older partner, in particular, was handled badly, and I felt that little to no research had been done by the author about the creeping, insidious nature of domestic violence and of domestic abusers.

None of the characters rang true for me; there’s not one that feels like a fully formed person you would know,  and have encountered in your own life. They just seem to be there purely to propel Jude’s narrative. The most honest moment in the book comes courtesy of JB. Lost and drug-addicted, he does a cruel impression of Jude and boy, he is never let off the hook for that one, because you’re not allowed to mock someone as fragile and broken as Jude.

I am actually infuriated thinking about just how shallow each character is. They are all so good, with the exception of JB’s brief time as a drug addict. They have no faults, no pettiness, no moments of dickheadishness that make up the human experience. They are constantly there for Jude, at any time, at any hour, despite having lives (and in Andy’s case, kids,) of their own.

I just wanted one of them, ONE, who when summoned to the hospital for the fiftieth time after Jude had done something disgusting to himself yet again to go, ‘Actually, it’s 3am and I have finally got to sleep, after being woken up 5 times already, so I am not going to come to the hospital to see Jude, I’ve got baby sick on my shoulder and I’ve not slept for six months, I HAVE A LIFE TOO, YOU KNOW!!!’

It takes 97% of the way through the book (I read the Kindle edition, so don’t know what page number this was) before HY finally gives Jude a break and lets him die.

Soon after that, all his close friends also die, all youngish in their late 50s and early 60s because NO-ONE IS ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY AND NORMAL AND WASH THEIR CAR ON A SUNDAY AND TAKE THEIR GRANDCHILDREN TO THE SEASIDE OR WATCH A FILM WITH A CUP OF TEA AND BISCUIT FOR DUNKING OR ANYTHING NICE LIKE THAT.

Spindly plot and poor characterisation aside, the writing isn’t that great. I felt that HY was trying to emulate the style of Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Goldfinch) Most novice writers do this - it’s a means of flexing your writing muscles and finding your own style - but this is HY second novel. Each over-descriptive, meandering paragraph reads like HY was wondering to herself how Tartt would have written the same book (better, is probably the answer, child abandonment and neglect being covered in The Goldfinch.)

There was far too much needless detail about dinners and the lives of the bit-player characters, and this was detail that could have been given to fully exploring Jude’s psychology further, beyond ‘sexual abuse fucks you up’. What about how being abandoned as a baby would fuck you up? About how not knowing who you are, where you come from, not having any normal relationships until you are in your 20s?

HY isn’t interested in this, she’s interested in the unrelenting, grim torture that abusers meter out to Jude and the cruelty he later inflicts on himself as a result.

Are there good things about the book? Yes. We are not given graphic, detailed descriptions of Jude’s abuse, and what is revealed is dealt with sparingly and very matter of factly.  The portions of the book about Jude’s early childhood are very good, his typical childish trust in adults and their motivations, his misunderstanding of the mysterious adult world is heart-breaking, and despite the awfulness of what happens to him at the monastery, I found those sections of the book the most interesting and vividly drawn.

I liked the fact that there’s no clear time setting (other than it’s obviously ‘modern’ times) to the novel - I imagined that the four friends met at college in the late 1980s / early 90s – but another reader could place them as first meeting in the 1970s. There’s little mention of technology or politics to provide a timescale. It’s not really clear why the author chooses to do this – I believe possibly so the book won’t ‘age’ and the story can speak for itself, instead of being a comment on  late 20^th / early 21^st century life.

I started this book on 14^th March and finished it today (2 May) It never normally takes me so long to read a book, even one as long as this. It felt like what it is; a slow, tedious, trudge through the thick sludge of an awful life, while someone hits you over the head with MEANINGS made of breeze blocks. 

I stayed with it because I had already invested time and money in it, but there are probably authors out there who have tackled this subject more competently and meaningfully. 

1/5.....'sorry'. (not sorry). 

Now for the updated bit...

I love reading bad reviews of books. Love it. In my search for reviews on this book, I discovered that the cover photo is called 'Orgasmic Man'. I have to say that a thought had occurred to me when I kept seeing the cover...is he in pain...or is he...? He looks like he might be....? Or at the very least it's a cry wank, maybe? 

So yeah, that cover photo more sums up what I think of the book (load of wank) than my review of the book. 

I probably shouldn't rush to review things when I'm pissed off with the author for mucking me around and wasting my time, because later I think, oh it wasn't  THAT bad.  

It actually wasn't that bad, I take back that the writing wasn't that good. I would have just liked to have read what this book could have been with some more ruthless editing and with less focus on Jude.

I might read Hanya Yanagihara's first book, so watch this space....