The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch

He can write and he can make scholarship exciting. Unless you’re exceptionally cultivated you’ll learn a lot from this novel… the final chapters are sparkling and irresistible. (Tibor Fischer in The Times)

 This masterly synthesis of idea and story makes complex concepts perfectly comprehensible and dramatic. Mulisch's bid for a masterpiece works commandingly on every level. Could be one of the best novels of the last twenty years. (Kirkus Reviews)

 Exhilarating, magnificent and dangerous. (The Times Literary Supplement)

My thoughts (roughly scribbled on a piece of paper):

What a load of tosh! This is being written on a bad day, but the last two weeks weren’t bad days, so it doesn't colour the view much. “The final chapters are sparkling and irresistible.” Bollocks, more like. The last quarter is dreadful. Hasn't he seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark? (or rather: when did he....?) Seeking out the tablets, how crass. And then whisking Quinten off in a flash of light as he ascends to heaven - you’re joking, surely. The final chapters are ridiculous, tedious, and unconvincing. I didn’t care what happened at all, because I had given up by the end.

If the final chapters are simply appalling, the rest of the book is more difficult to define. A philosophical novel it is not. An exercise in name-dropping platitudes, perhaps. Unlike Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters, there is no insight into the way that ideas might affect a person’s life. The ideas - names - are there for a reader in the know to nod their head at, but little more. And as for ‘learning’ something from the book, nothing is treated in any depth or thought throughout - if you don’t know what is being referred to, you’re lost. The book is anything but ‘profound’ and only dangerous as a physical object.

So, its not philosophy, but is it literature? Perhaps. There is poignancy in the human relationships, there is tragedy, such as Ada’s coma, which has some excellent descriptions, and Max’s relationship with Sophia. There is, in the first three-quarters at least, some kind of novel in there. But the whole thing is cast within the framework of angels organising events, influencing people, even killing them, and the whole effect is that it is stripped of everything relating to emotion or poignancy. For a book which spends so much time talking about the absurdity of life and how that is in a sense meaningful, it is infuriating: the absurdity is only within the human world and it is perfectly meaningful from outside. Helga gets her throat cut, and dies trying to use a vandalised telephone box. But we know that she has only had her throat cut and that the telephone box has only been vandalised because angels decided that it should happen, which as a literary device is suicide. Every action, every thought has been implanted - so how is a reader supposed to sympathise? Answer: you don’t. All the characters, all the events are tainted by artificiality and contrivance, explicitly by the angels and implicitly by the author.

It isn’t just a pretentious novel, philosophically, but an abomination, since in literary terms it is an exercise in how not to write a novel. If you want to read a similar - but far superior - book, read Mosley; if you want to read a philosophical novel, read Stiller by Max Frisch; if you have to read this, skip the intermezzos etc. and the last quarter. But otherwise, don’t touch it with a barge-pole.

(The title, I suppose, is ironic: the book is ‘about’ the loss of heaven - we are deserted - and when Max discovered it, he was hit by a well-aimed meteor. And why have we been abandoned? Because of technology! Technology is evil and leads us away from religion, until we abandon God and He abandons us. Big Deal. Yawn)

Wayfarers, by Knut Hamsun

Not even Thomas Hardy could wring such tragedy from a handful of ordinary characters, closely observed in their rural surroundings. (Now!)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

A good book. A bit Buddenbrooks, a bit of a drama, with a great amount of insight. The ‘wayfarers’ are threefold: Edevart and August, wandering around Norway; all those who head for America and the new world; and the whole advance towards progress. In the inevitability and then both the benefits and problems of progress, the book has a lot to say. But it isn’t Mysteries, which leaves you with an enigma still demanding to be solved. You’re left instead with a good, romantic story.

Group Portrait with Lady, by Heinrich Böll

A work of considerable distinction. (The Times Literary Supplement)

Leni (the central character) is seen through a series of interviews with witnesses who make up this huge ‘group portrait’. This works brilliantly as a parody of fashionable documentary; then by making the story resonant with overlapping echoes; and finally by counter-pointing these voices of the imagination with the terrible dead language of real documents of Nazi bureaucracy. (The Guardian)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

As the review says, a work of considerable distinction, one that demands re-reading, if only because what is not said, more than most novels, is what is important. The Au. is perhaps the greatest literary creation, in the sense that the book is about the author’s fleshing out a character through research, etc., only finally confronting her face-to-face at the end. The style is perhaps at once its strength and weakness, and its ‘politics’ may be distracting - ‘another book about the war.’ But it isn't really about the war…

War with the Newts, by Karel Čapek

A great writer of the past who speaks to the present in a voice brilliant, clear, honourable, blackly funny and prophetic. (Kurt Vonnegut)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

A fascinating tale, wittily and well told. One feels part of the new history being created, what with all the newspapers and so on. The satire is immaculate. A thoroughly good read.

The Land of Green Plums, by Herta Müller

A novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania. (New York Book Review)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

A good book. Beautifully orchestrated. It should be read again, I think, in order to appreciate its symbols… But what I find interesting is that in the end it seems so easy to emigrate, and the guards can do nothing about it. So why didn't they emigrate before? But that's part of the point, I suppose.

Children of Darkness and Light, by Nicholas Mosley

In Children of Darkness and Light, Mosley's fiction reaches a stunning, final maturity that raises the game of the novel itself. (Independent on Sunday)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

A strange book - one that demands a second reading. Perhaps it says too much, perhaps too little - the overall message seems much the same as Hopeful Monsters, only less developed. And more confusing - I’m not quite sure what happened in the end.

The Cement Garden, by Ian McEwan

A disturbing book, beautiful but bothersome, full of raw animal instinct and passion. (Boston Globe)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

An enigmatic book. The author seems to stand back and take Wilde’s advice, that art should reflect the audience and not the artist… Does it pass judgements on the events within, such as incest? I don’t think so: one thing seems naturally to lead to another. But do we end up with the reasonableness of, say, incest, or the corruption of reason which leads to it seeming natural?

Or is it about me, who just can't make up his mind?