Recent books I've not finished.

Books I’ve been unable or unwilling to finish recently. This is a big step for me. I used to think I owed the book, the author and the universe the obligation of finishing a book when I started it. Rather like hatching a chick, when the eggs broke you’ve got to watch it grow, even if it’s brain-muddled with only one eye. So here goes, a list of books that are unputdownable, only I did.

          Tom Rob Smith (2009) Child 44. I got to page 13 on this one. It’s 1933 and in the Soviet village of Chervoy the locals, in sub-zero temperatures, are starving to death. All the rats have been eaten. When Pavel spies a household cat in the trees where they go to collect firewood he knows he needs to be careful or someone else will get to it first and live. Only a boy, but the man of the house, his mother coaxes him into taking his younger brother with him, to trap it. He traps the cat in the forest and hides its body under some branches. Someone crashes through the undergrowth and he realises it’s not the cat the assailant wants for food, it’s him.

          This is an easy read. If you stuck me on a train for several hours I’d probably read it. Only I’m not on a train. I don’t get the sense of authenticity I demand of a book.

          Christina Stead (1995 [1940]) The Man Who Loved Children, with an introduction by Doris Lessing. I got to page 51 on this one. The reason I begun reading it was because I’d read Lessing’s autobiography and she praised Stead. From reading the introduction I know the plot of the story, which is that the Pollit family, a respectable middle-class family that live in an ‘ancient rattlebag of a house’, near Wisconsin Avenue, get poorer and poorer. Henny, likes shopping and treats and doesn’t like to be disturbed by the mess of children and their relative poverty, which she ignores. She longs to be pampered and rich as she was a child. She longs for social engagements with people of her own standing that will understand her. This is a replication of Stead’s own mother throughout her childhood, but with a more ordered way of doing things. Henny’s husband, Sam, loves all living things, loves his children, even Louisa, aged eleven, the eldest of their brood, from his first marriage, whom Henny thinks is ugly and therefore a disagreeable child.

          I can see why Lessing loved this book, but I neither love Henny, nor Sam, the cute twins or even ugly Louisa. If there’s no love in a book, forget it.  

          Doris Lessing (2001 [1993]) The Fifth Child. I respect rather than love Lessing. She’s been writing since the 1930s and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. This is a short book 157 pages. I got to page 19. It begins with an office party. Harriet and David are made for each other. They both want lots of children. Settle on a house and it’s such bliss. The first child is not planned.

I don’t care. I don’t like Lessing’s style. ‘So what is it about these two that made them freaks and oddballs? It was their attitude to sex!’ A Nobel Prize winner can get away with that kind of thing. Harriet and David also seem to me to be one-dimensional, living in London, but I’m not sure where or when. I don’t really want to find out.