The Borrowed Book Club

Morrissey So-Famous-I-Only-Need-One-Name's first novel List of the Lost  is nothing short of a tragedy. A tragedy for the publishers who agreed to stroke his inflated ego by allowing it to go to print, a tragedy for readers everywhere who waste precious hours (which seem to drag on) in the valiant effort to finish the novel (if you can call it that - it somehow seems an insult to all other novels to do so), and a tragedy for the plot, which should have been a moving and thought-provoking exploration of love and loss. List of the Lost  follows a four-piece American relay team in the 1970s after they accidentally kill a homeless man. From thereon in, things get progressively weirder, as Morrissey struggles to decide if he is writing a fantasy, a philosophical novel or literary fiction. The entire thing is a mess. A large part of the issue comes from Morrissey's self-indulgent writing style, similar to that of an angsty, precocious fifteen year old who has learned about lit...

Expectations always run high when opening a Ian McEwan novel and  Saturday , his ninth novel, does not disappoint. The novel follows Henry Perowne, a middle-aged. middle class neurosurgeon, through Saturday 15th February 2003, a day of squash matches, altercations, family gatherings, a suspected terror attack and the protests against the Iraq War. Perowne lives in Fitzroy Square, London, near enough to be affected by the protests without being in the middle of them; a metaphor for the unsettled nature of Britain at this time, a time when terror attacks were seen as an inevitable part of the future and war against Saddam Hussein was unstoppable in spite of people's obvious protestations. All of this aside,  Saturday  is a novel about family, literature and science: it centres around a family dinner on the Saturday evening, with all of the complications and dysfunctions that many families face. McEwan uses a third person yet limited narrator, meaning that the reader le...

The Perks of Being a Wallflower,  Stephen Chbosky's first novel, is an epistolary tale of Charlie's first year at high school in which he writes to an unknown 'friend' about his struggles. It is unsurprisingly full of the angst that is archetypal of its genre, as Charlie develops from a lonely 'wallflower' into the more confident friend of two seniors, Sam and Patrick. That said, Perks  also deals with some serious issues that seem to increasingly affect young people internationally such as mental health problems, suicide, abuse and drug use. Each of these is dealt with in a highly believable fashion, and Chbosky seems to understand many of the issues that contemporary teens are facing. It is therefore unsurprising to discover that Charlie is loosely based upon a teen version of Chbosky, and that during the five year period it took him to create the novel, his aim was to respect, validate and celebrate teenagers' experiences. One of the most interesting...

Peter Gumbel's second published essay, They Shoot Schoolchildren, Don't They? ( On achève bien les écoliers ), is a carefully worded, thoroughly researched indictment of the French education system. Gumbel, an English journalist, academic and father of two children going through the French education system, has lived in Paris for 14 years and certainly does not hold back but, equally, does not come across as being excessively critical, as each of his ideas is supported by a great deal of evidence. Gumbel's main criticism of the system is its focus on students' nullité (worthlessness) and échecs scolaires (academic failures) - the entire system is based upon what are widely-regarded as old-fashioned styles of teaching, in which humiliation of failure is prioritised over encouragement of progress. I have experienced both teaching approaches at various times in my life, and I must confess that there is merit to both of them. However, while a nurturing approach encour...

Gil Courtemanche's first novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali  is a startlingly frank portrayal of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. It tells the story of one couple, Bernard Valcourt and Gentille. Valcourt is a middle-aged journalist from Canada, living in Rwanda to create a documentary about AIDS (a semi-autobiographical version of Courtemanche), while Gentille is a beautiful young Hutu Rwandan with distinctive Tutsi features who is a waitress at the Mille Collines Hotel, where Valcourt and many other expats are staying. The pair marry, adopt their friends' now orphaned child and are trying to escape from the Hutu massacre of Tutsis and their sympathisers when the two are separated.  In Courtemanche's preface, he establishes and defends the legitimacy of his novel, based on real people (and almost always using their real names) and real events, which have been used to create a realistic retelling of the genocide, where Courtemanche has only 'taken the liberty of inv...

The minute you open any one of Jonas Jonasson's novels, you know it. His third novel, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All , is no different, including his trademark style: a funny yet improbable plot with unlikely heroes, with a detached, understated and self-aware third person narrator. The plot is based around three central characters: Johanna Kjellander, an atheist priest who has just been kicked out of her parish, Per Persson, the homeless receptionist of a brothel that has turned into a one-star hotel, and Hitman Anders, an ex-hitman who is now hired out by various members of the Swedish underworld to break the bones of other members of that same underworld. When the three collide in rather unexpected circumstances, a great plan is hatched: Per and Johanna use the tabloids' love of scandal to promote Anders' 'skills' and cash in on his exploits. However, when Anders finds Jesus and decides to give up that line of work entirely in search of the meaning ...