The Borrowed Book Club

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451  creates a dystopian future world, reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984 , in which houses are fire-proof, and firemen exist to burn books (and often their owners, who refuse to live without them). In a world without books 'confusing' people, where each house's parlour contains a virtual 'family' and a one channel television, meaningful human interaction is practically non-existent. The resulting hedonistic society use violence as their only remaining outlet for self-expression and  the concept 'ignorance is bliss' is being applied to almost every situation in life. As a result,  the people are so brain-dead to any other possibilities of life that they do not realise how shallow and meaningless their existence truly is.  Guy Montag starts the novel as one of the many, a fireman who never realised how truly unhappy he was until Clarisse McClellan, his teenage neighbour, appeared and disappeared so suddenly from his life,...

Jeffrey Eugenides' debut novel centred on a cluster of suicides by five teenage sisters is strikingly unconventional. Firstly, there is the paradox of a coming of age tale centred on suicide, which could be made into a striking psychological commentary about society in the late twentieth century and instead withers following the anticlimactic reveal of the novel's opening pages. Secondly, the narrative voice is an ambiguously maintained 'we', only identified as a group of middle aged men who were infatuated with the Lisbon girls as teenagers.  This perspective results in a measured tone, as the men reflect on events from many years ago, using what they remember from their obsessive observation of the Lisbons, tinted with nostalgia and the fogginess of time, along with a variety of 'exhibits' that they have amalgamated over the years, from one of the girl's bras to family photos, in an  attempt to piece together the story behind the series of tragedies tha...

Having only read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia once, it is impossible to do it justice on paper, as in order to fully appreciate its subtle complexities it would be necessary to pore over it for days. Stoppard's masterly juxtaposition of the early nineteenth century and the modern day inextricably intertwines the two time periods, as each scene from Georgian England feeds into its modern counterpart, in which academics research the events the audience has just seen unfold in the very same house, creating a strong sense of dramatic irony. The result is an astoundingly profound comedy which reflects on the flexibility of time and the links between history and science.  Apart, neither of these story lines would be of great note - it is Stoppard's artistry in combining the two which creates theatrical magic. Despite the complexity of the plot, Stoppard manages these two time periods with exceptional ease, using extensive stage directions to illustrate how the two worlds physical...

Like a younger sibling striving to achieve the heights of his older brother's success, Enigma falls short by comparison with Harris' debut, Fatherland. The idea behind the novel itself is highly interesting, as it focuses on a Cambridge graduate turned cryptanalyst, Tom Jericho, working at Bletchley Park during The Second World War in an attempt to crack the novel's eponymous code in its most difficult form. Beneath this central plot line lies Jericho's shattered relationship with the attractive and mysterious Claire Romilly and the constant threat of his deteriorating mental health. When Claire suddenly disappears one night, Jericho forms an unlikely alliance with Hester Wallace, her plain, intelligent and strongly feminist housemate, in a bid to uncover her truths once and for all. Yet despite its mysterious start and the great intrigue that the blurb suggests, the first half of the novel is an uphill struggle, with several laboured descriptions preventing th...