We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Discussion questions from ReadingGroupGuides. Answers are mine. (Contains spoilers! You think you know what’s going to happen in this book, but you don’t! – At least, I didn’t.)

1. Non-maternal, ambivalent mothers are one of the last taboos — and Eva is a prime example. Were her motives for having a baby entirely selfish? And if so, how much can that have factored into the outcome of an abnormally difficult baby and apathetic child? In contrast to Kevin, Celia was loving, needy and sweet — and her mother’s favorite, if not her father’s. By the very end of the novel, has Eva’s love for Kevin, or at least her primitive loyalty to him, finally become unconditional? How does this fit in with the feminist ideal of motherhood?

I think Eva’s motives for having a baby are probably similar to anyone else’s – at least, similar to the motivations of many older mothers who have a happy marriage, a nice house and a successful career. This is exactly the stage at which many women are choosing to have children now. There’s nothing inherently selfish about this.

Other women – whose offspring have turned out less disastrously than Eva’s – would reason that very same choice in more positive terms: ‘I had a good life, so why not share it with a child?’ The ‘selfish’ accusation is fruitless because it goes both ways. I’ve heard people say that it is selfish NOT to have children. It all depends on your individual world-view.

Really, why does anyone have children these days? You might well ask, especially of someone in Eva’s position. It’s clear, children don’t make everyone happy, and it’s perhaps selfish to expect them to.

The Chicago Tribune recently divided happiness in two:

• Day to day happiness
• Long-term satisfaction

When it comes to having kids, I think your own kids contribute to both kinds of happiness, but parents soon learn to focus on the long-term rewards, especially in those first sleep-deprived months before the baby is even smiling. With kids, there can be two hours of happiness, ten-minutes of unhappy tantruming, another half-hour of good, two-hours of misery in the car. Children are a funny kind of happiness. But like childbirth itself, mothers tend to look back with overall fondness. (Unless it all turns to shit, in which case they may view child-rearing as Eva does.)

As for Unconditional Love, by the end of the novel I did not interpret that Eva’s love for Kevin had suddenly become ‘unconditional’. Sure, she bought an apartment with a spare bedroom in anticipation of him joining her upon release from prison. Its sheets are clean and she has furnished Kevin’s room with his favourite book. But this is Eva’s way of accepting responsibility. We haven’t enough words in English to express all the different kinds of love. Perhaps ‘unconditional responsibility’ is a better phrase for Eva in relation to her son.

(What’s the ‘feminist ideal of motherhood’ anyway? There are so many different sects of feminism. I’d hate to lump feminists all in together.)

2. Is Eva’s view of Kevin colored by her ambivalence about motherhood in general, or perhaps by hindsight knowledge of his eventual violence? Is Eva responsible for creating a child she sees as a monster, or was he a monster all along?

The very act of writing letters to her dead husband enforces a high degree of self-reflection – she says so on the very last page. It’s impossible that Eva’s view of Kevin are not coloured by two years of heavy reflection.

As for the old nature-versus-nurture debate, even the experts can’t agree on this. Since having a child of my own, I’m inclined to think – from my own limited experience – that it’s about half genes and half environment.

Environment itself can be split in two again: the home versus the community (encompassing school, other significant adults, TV, media, books etc.) Again, I’d say this sphere of influence is probably only about fifty-fifty. I don’t believe adults have that much control over their teenagers. If the groundwork isn’t there at age five, the kid is probably lost for life. This view is pessimistic and fatalistic. Nevertheless, I think it’s pretty much the case.

3. Eva’s tone changes throughout the course of her letter-writing. She is in turns angry, frustrated and mystified. Could you describe Eva as a loving mother — in deed if not in thought? Was Kevin overly indulged by a parenting style that let him potty train and learn at his own pace?

I’m sure all mothers have experienced each of Eva’s ‘tones’ at various stages. I suspect Eva experienced a form of post-natal depression after Kevin which she didn’t after Celia. So many mothers are affected by PND that this is highly likely in Eva’s case. The pressures on mothers to do everything right for their children is so high these days that even trouble with breast-feeding can send a new mother into a downward spiral. I’m actually a little surprised – after all Eva’s reflection – that she didn’t consider the possibility of PND. (Or did she? Can’t remember it.)

Perhaps Eva is more like Kevin than even she realises – Kevin takes full responsibility for his own actions. Eva would too. For some, admitting to a weakness – even to a psychological illness - feels worse than accepting culpability for something truly heinous. This is a shame.

4. Did the inclusion of a child into Eva and Franklin’s stable, loving relationship cause the rift between them? Did the fact of a child threaten their marriage? How was Kevin perceived as a threat by Eva from conception? What expectations did Eva have of motherhood and how did she meet the reality of it? Was Franklin unsupportive of Eva?

Relationships are not tested until after children enter a relationship. A reshuffling takes place as mother, father and child jockey for position. Eva and Franklin’s relationship may look better in hindsight than it actually was. It’s natural that Eva look back to that period in her life with rose-tinted glasses; it’s all she has.

Perhaps older mothers have more difficulty accepting motherhood. I think this is symbolised by Eva’s choice to keep her own name. For an older woman, getting married is not always a reason to change her name. After all, she’s been her own person for much of her life. Likewise, an older woman’s body has been her own long before it becomes a baby-making machine.

In contrast, a young woman who gives birth straight out of high school has less to sacrifice than a woman like Eva who seemed to have it all. Women now have a choice in whether they have children and how many we have. (More accurately: educated, middle-class women have the real choice.) When women get older, we’ve had more time to think things through. We understand the consequences of having children and that this decision is the single biggest one we’ll ever make in our lives. When women are younger, I don’t think we think things through as much. We take more risks in general and, for many young parents, having children is just another one – not even a risk, in most cases – more like a life-stage, like ‘getting a place to live’, ‘buying a car’, ‘moving in together’.

5. The irony of Eva having read Robin Hood to an ailing, needy Kevin at a time of almost shocking mother-son bonding is played out in the way Kevin massacred his fellow students and the teacher who took an interest in him. Since it is Eva who connects Kevin’s fevered state with her recollection of his unusual interest in anything whatsoever, is it possible that Kevin’s methods were meant to figuratively slay his mother?

It is difficult for a reader to surmise anything about Kevin, because we only see him through the eyes of his mother. We have no way of knowing how accurately Eva portrays Kevin, however tempting it is to take her word for events as they happened. Kevin does not have a single redeeming quality, so it’s possible he did mean to slay his mother figuratively. Eva draws him as a psychopath.

The one thing which indicates a little humanism is the TV interview Kevin gave from his jail cell, during which he refused to answer questions about his mother, choosing instead to respect her privacy. I think Kevin respected Eva for at least understanding him. He did not respect his father; Franklin was too naive to see the boy for what he really is.

6. After Eva throws Kevin across the room, she takes him to the hospital. She confesses later on to Franklin, “However much I deserved rebuke, I still preferred the slow burn of private self-excoriation to the hot lash of public reproof.” Are Eva’s letters to Franklin her form of self-excoriation, though she is suffering public reproof as the mother of a mass murderer?

I didn’t realise until near the end – when it was revealed – that Franklin (and Celia) had been slayed along with the people from school. So Franklin will never see Eva’s letters, and Eva’s confessions to Franklin are confessions to no one.

Yes, the letters are a form of self-excoriation – a catharsis – a release. But the nature of writing such things is that they act as a temporary relief from pain. She may be fooling herself into thinking her son was a born psychopath. She may, in fact, be omitting many other details which would lead the reader to believe that it is actually Eva who is the true psychopath. She may be fooling herself.

7. Does Eva feel responsible for Kevin’s series of nasty deeds and childhood “pranks?” Does she think she could have prevented any of it? Does she come to realize why Kevin would harm other children or does she give up trying to understand? How can we sympathize with a mother and father who saw all the warning signs but failed to stop the violence?

Eva admits on the final page that she has no idea how much she is to blame. She tells events as she thinks they happened, and gives up trying to pass judgment. Shriver’s protagonist gives up because it is the job of the reader to pass judgment, or more accurately, to think deeply enough about this issue in order that we understand the shades of grey.

Eva saw the warning signs but I don’t think Franklin did. (No one, not even Eva, could predict that her own son would turn into a mass-murderer though.) Franklin was your typical hood-winked parent. In fact, Eva was vilified for seeing her son’s true colours. Mothers, of all people, are supposed to stand up for their children even against all odds. Eva is damned that she did, damned that she didn’t.

8. Given that the story is told from Eva’s perspective only, can she be trusted as reliable? How do you think Franklin’s version of events would have differed? Might Eva choose to portray Kevin in childhood as more wicked than he really was, if only to make her seem less culpable for his crimes as a teenager?

Eva is an unreliable narrator, but the fact these letters are to herself, strewn across her desk for no one’s eyes but her own, reveal at the end of the book that she has no reason to lie to anyone else. If she’s lying, it’s to herself.

Eva certainly understands intricacies of a topic. She writes:

‘Let’s talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I’m not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. (p202)’

I think this is one of the central and most interesting ideas thrown up by this novel. Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller examined similar themes – asking the question: Can teenagers be responsible for their part in crime, even if under the age of majority? After all, our age of majority is arbitrary.

Franklin would have been a less reflective narrator. Certainly, he never saw the true evil in Kevin, not until the moment before he was killed, when his corpse looked ‘disappointed’. (This chilled me.) Eva was the better choice of narrator, and her froidure is prerequisite. A warm character would have told a less objective tale, subjective as this tale must be.

9. What were Eva’s reasons for having a second child? Did Franklin forgive her for the deception? Was she repentant? How closely were her expectations met and was she gratified? How did Franklin’s attitude toward Kevin and Celia differ?

Perhaps Eva wanted to find out if the problem was with her or with Kevin – a second child might prove Eva’s success as a mother – if not as a mother to Kevin, at least as a mother to somebody else. She had already lost control of Kevin by the time she gave birth to Celia.

Also, I’ve noticed that most people speak of their decision to ‘have children’. Very rarely do you hear somebody say, ‘We’re thinking of having A Child.’ Once you’ve made the decision (Eva would say ‘sacrifice’) to become a mother of one, you’re not giving up much more to become a mother of two. There is immense pressure to have more than one child, because of out-dated ideas about Only Child Syndrome and such-like.

Biology no doubt played a part – at the age of 44 she had a very narrow window in which to conceive. The effects of ageing are permanent.

10. Toward the end of the novel, it is revealed that Kevin has more complicated feelings about his mother and some of the 9 people he murdered. This gives us a hint as to why he might have carefully planned and carried out Thursday. Does he seem pathetic or more deserving of compassion because he may have had a motive, after all?

I interpret this as simply ‘growing up’. I don’t believe people can fully understand consequences until we are in our mid-twenties, at least, even intelligent people like Kevin.

I did not feel compassion for Kevin. I don’t believe this was the author’s intention. I felt compassion for his mother. The story is Eva’s.

11. At the conclusion of the novel, did you find Eva sympathetic in a way you may not have initially? Do you think Eva has sympathy and forgiveness for herself? Is she able to accept Kevin, and to see his personality as, however uncomfortably, akin to her own?

Probably due to Eva’s honesty – or perceived honesty – I felt compassion for Eva the whole way through. I found letters to her husband extremely sad, more so when I learned of his death.

I have heard other readers say they found Eva cold throughout. Others lose compassion for her in the final chapters, but that wasn’t the case for me.

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As always, it’s a feat when an author manages to engage a reader throughout a novel with an ‘unlikeable character’. It’s easier to write a likeable character. But to make a character interesting – despite her glaring flaws – interesting enough to engage readers and leave us with complex feelings about her – now that’s an achievement.

This is a truly outstanding book that left me cold. Cold, but thoughtful.

Related Links:

1. Are Some Children Just Born Evil?

2. Looking Again At We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, from Blue Milk

The Riders by Tim Winton

WHAT HAPPENS

Fred Scully has just moved to Shannon, Ireland and is renovating a rundown eighteenth century cottage which stands beneath the ruins of an ancient Celtic castle. This was purchased on a whim. While doing the place up, Scully waits for his wife and daughter to join him. There, they will start a new life. Scully is presented as a simple, content man.

The wind ploughed about outside as he drank off his Guiness. The yeasty, warm porter expanded in his gut and he moaned with pleasure. Geez, Scully, he thought, you’re not hard to please. Just look at you. (p8)

We know something must happen to him to shake his world view. He will undergo a transformation from content to not content.

The wife (Jennifer) is back in Australia with their 7 year old daughter (Billie) tying up loose ends in their former home of Fremantle. The family has spent the last few years travelling. Scully worked as a laborer so that Jennifer could pursue her dream of being an artist. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the talent to be sufficiently good at any one thing.

Scully works long hours, painting, plumbing, re-wiring, and installing a new outside dunny. Nesting, in other words, and counting down the days until his partner joins him. In the meantime he receives scant news of what’s happening back home. Tension builds. The reader knows something bad is about to happen.

At about page 100, Scully finally goes to meet his wife and child at the airport. But the wife is not there. The child is silent and will not explain what has happened to her mother.

The mood of the novel shifts at this point as Scully reevaluates his future. He goes on a trip across Europe in search of his wife: Greek Isles, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam.

Friends he thought he knew when he was with his wife are now almost strangers who give every indication that they know far more than they are letting on. They pity him and want him gone, or else they show anger and contempt for him that he never knew existed.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The following questions are from abebooks.com

Discussion Questions:

1. Kathy jumps right into telling her story as though we’re already familiar with Hailsham and her culture. At which point in the story are you able to start piecing the information together to understand what words like “donation” and “carer” mean? Does the witholding of information make you want to read more, or do you find it frustrating?

I sometimes get frustrated with this method of storytelling: ie., the deliberate withholding of information. It’s because I’m an impatient reader, not because the storytelling is not masterful. By chapter three I thought, what on earth is going on here? I thought I might’ve missed something important. I hadn’t. He just hadn’t gone there yet.

So, after chapter three, which is how long I normally give a book before deciding whether to continue, I decided to go online and find out the gist. I cheated. I read the start of some reviews and also watched the movie trailer on YouTube. The trailer gives away a lot more than the book blurb. Once I found out the basic premise, I went back to the book with renewed enthusiasm. So this is what everyone has been raving about, I thought.

2. What does Hailsham stand for in Kathy’s life? Compare and contrast how Kathy, Tommy, Ruth, Chrissie and Rodney view Hailsham, and what it represents in their lives.

For Kathy, Hailsham probably represents a time of innocence. Ruth may have been more knowledgeable and therefore more angry about the whole thing. Kathy thinks that Tommy knew, at some level, what was in store and that this explained his anger. Perhaps she was right.

The characters Chrissie and Rodney were not memorable for me.

3. Why do you think Hailsham’s guardians placed such an emphasis on creating?

I wondered this throughout much of the book. The art was obviously symbolic of something much bigger but I couldn’t see what, unless it was something to keep them occupied. If these kids were not going to lead full adult lives there seemed no reason to train them in complex things, like doctors and lawyers. Why not have them indulge their creative sides, have fun?

4. How do you think the novel would be different if narrated from the point of view of Tommy, Ruth, Miss Emily or Madame? What characteristics of the novel are unique to Kathy’s point of view and voice?

A novel like this needs a certain kind of narrator: honest, insightful and frank. Kathy is all of these things. There is also a naivety to Kathy, which is necessary for the slow unfolding of detail – she tells the story from her childhood but without getting down to the nitty gritty. The fact she simply did not know her fate throughout childhood makes this slow unfolding seem natural.

Tommy is too naive to be a reliable narrator.

Ruth would perhaps be too unlikeable to encourage a reader to stick with her the whole way through. I suspect Ruth is more unlikeable than Kathy lets on, since nice people tend to see good in others.

Miss Emily or Madame could have told the story, but there would not have been the suspense, the wondering. Being in full possession of facts from the outset, they would have been obliged to tell the reader the full story from chapter one. This is obviously not the structure Ishiguro had in mind.

5. What are some of Ruth’s most striking character traits? How might her social behavior, at Hailsham and later at the Cottages, be explained? Why does she seek her “possible” so earnestly? Why do you think Ruth is attracted to a relationship with Tommy?

I found Ruth manipulative and disloyal, even before she confessed, before her own death, that she’d tried to keep Ruth and Tommy apart.

The knowledge that you are to be used for your organs would affect different personalities in different ways: Whereas Kathy is resigned to the fact, and accepts caring then donating as her purpose in life, it seems that Ruth took longer to come to this way of thinking. I do feel for Ruth. I think I would be the same in her situation.

Perhaps she seeks her ‘possible’ so earnestly because she is forever wondering what life would be like if she weren’t born to be a donor.

Ruth may have been attracted to a relationship with Tommy because Tommy is the opposite of herself in this respect; he has a naivety that she wishes she could enjoy.

Also, because she can. Some people seek out relationships with others mainly to fulfill something lacking in themselves, or because the alternative is to have nobody at all. Knowing that Tommy and Kathy may well have been better suited, it could have been a power thing for Ruth, maintaining her position as top of their small hierarchy of personalities.

6. Compare student life at Hailsham to your own school experience, or that of children in your life right now. What aspects are common to the imaginary world of Hailsham and your own? What is different?

Certain childlike behaviour and the way children behave in groups is mirrored in the Hailsham world, e.g. trends that start in the microcosm of a single school and catch on. At Hailsham, students took to passing around a cassette recorder, each member of a group listening to only a few seconds of a song. I haven’t seen this exact thing happen in schools, but I’m reminded of when I was in Year 7, and it became normal to go around with a can of drink saying, ‘Sip for sip?’ After this became trendy, it was almost selfish to guzzle your entire drink without exchanging sips.

Madame and Miss Emily represent two kinds of teachers found in any school: the aloof and the friendly, but each, in her own way, caring.

7. How does the story change after Kathy and Tommy visit Madame and Miss Emily to request a deferral? What is revealed in their conversation, and how does your experience of the story change?

Just before Part 3 I was moved to revisit the first few pages of the book, knowing that this time they would make more sense to me. There is so much time-shifting throughout the narrative that this didn’t feel an unnatural thing to do.

Things became clearer again when I read Miss Emily’s full explanation. I understood why the donor under Kathy’s care in chapter one wanted her to explain the details of Hailsham to him over and over; obviously he had been brought up in far inferior conditions. Certain other incidents had more significance.

8. Why does Tommy draw imaginary animals in miniature? Why does he continue to work on them even after he learns that there will be no deferral?

The students’ explanation for the art is explained in chapter 15:

‘…Madame’s got a gallery somewhere filled with stuff by students from when they were tiny. Suppose two people come up and say they’re in love. She can find the art they’ve done over years and years. She can see if they go. If they match. Don’t forget, Kath, what she’s got reveals our souls. She could decide for herself what’s a good match and what’s just a stupid crush.’ Of course, we find out later that this is not true at all.

The animals may be symbolic of the clones themselves. Kathy observes: ‘I was taken aback at how densely detailed each one was. In fact, it took a moment to see they were animals at all. The first impression was like one you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird’.

That observation may be interpreted from an outsider’s point of view: e.g. Until I looked closely, I never thought of clones as real people. But if you take time to understand them, you realise how complex they are – just as complex as any other human being.

The progression of Tommy’s drawings reflects the state of his health. Later, after he has done two donations: ‘Tommy’s drawings weren’t as fresh now…something was definitely gone, and they looked laboured, almost like they’d been copied. [cloned] So that feeling came again, even though I tried to keep it out: that we were doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we were now thinking and planning.’

9. When Madame sees Kathy dancing to the song on the Judy Bridgewater tape, we learn Kathy’s interpretation of what she thinks Madame must be thinking. Why did you think Madame was crying? When Madame recalls this incident later from her own perspective, did it match your expectations?

At the time, I thought Madame felt extreme sadness because, whereas most of the time she didn’t allow herself to see the children as real human beings, every now and then she saw some incident which reminded her, inarguably that they are.

So my interpretation was a bit different from that of Madame, who imagined the future getting worse and worse for clones, and who imagined Kathy might be clinging on to the status quo.

10. What is the significance of Never Let Me Go as Kathy’s song, the title of the book, and in the last few pages of the novel?

About halfway through the book – when they thought they caught sight of Ruth’s possible – I came up with the disturbing idea that Kathy wrote this book for the recipient for her own organs. The semi-regular addresses to some unknown second person made sense that way, and so did the title. It felt like Kathy saying, ‘Never forget this huge sacrifice I have made for you. Don’t forget me.’

But I don’t think this is it at all. I think Kathy is addressing other clones, future clones, who will be born into a much harsher world. She doesn’t want them to fall for the same rumour. The ‘you’ is a younger clone.

11. After their visit to Miss Emily and Madame, Kathy tells Tommy that his fits of rage might be explained by the fact that “at some level you always knew.” How much did the students at Hailsham know while they were there? Do you think Tommy knew more than the others?

No, I don’t think Tommy knew more than the others. Fits of rage can come from anywhere. I’d say if anyone knew more than others, it was Ruth.

12. Does the novel take a moral or ethical position on cloning, or does it just open a dialog? What response did it evoke from you? What implications are there for our own society?

To suggest that ‘the novel’ takes a moral or ethical position on cloning is to suggest that ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’ takes a position. It would be dangerous, as ever, to suggest that the author’s own viewpoint can be aligned with those of characters in his novel.

I think Ishiguro’s intention is to weave a fascinating and thought-provoking story. He may have got to this point asking: What if? What if cloning were not only possible, but carried out? How would that feel, from the POV of the cloned?

Despite having found out the kids were harvested for organs, I didn’t realise the kids were clones until chapter twelve: ‘Since each of us was copied at some point form a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life. This meant, at leat in theory, you’d be able to find the person you were modelled from.’

Before this point I thought they might have been taken from some lower class, or created in test tubes from castoff eggs and sperm, something like that. Later, one of them (I think Ruth) assumes the same – that they come from downtrodden roots. I don’t think this is ever resolved, or if it is, I missed it.

As for implications for our society: I can’t see cloning happening anytime soon, at least not for this purpose. When the ethics of a society shift, they generally change in favour of more human-rights, not fewer. This is a generalisation we can make across time and country borders.

If Ishiguro says anything, it’s about issues much wider than cloning itself. When Miss Emily explains the situation in her front room, she might well be talking about boat people, or the poor, or prostitutes who put their lives on the line to service other, more privileged people in society.

Miss Emily also says, ‘People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens that you grew up at a certain point in this process.’ This reminds me very much of Australia’s ’Stolen Generation’. At the time, the government thought it was ethcially right to take part-white Aboriginal children from their mothers and place them in urban white homes. Now everyone realises this was so wrong, and the stolen children themselves have nothing with which to console themselves, apart from this very fact.

The hypothetical implications within this story are even sadder, because the future only looks bleaker for subsequent generations, not better.

13. Miss Emily believed that hiding the truth from the Hailsham students was best, while Miss Lucy wanted to make the students more aware of their future. Which method do you agree with and why?

The only way to answer it is with this question: If you were a clone, due to die some time around your thirtieth birthday, would you want to know?

Is there a positive side to knowing your own future? If there is, it is this: You make the most of every single day.

Or do you? Some people have life-threatening illnesses, near-accidents and come back as if they’ve been through some personal revolution. Other people recover and are initially grateful but are just as grumpy as ever once life has settled into its normal routine. When I have a near-death experience – in a car, say – I’m grateful for about an hour, then I’m same old same old. It didn’t happen so meh. Wasn’t meant to.

I don’t think that knowing your own life span is helpful. If I had a chance to see my own future and know the day I would die, I wouldn’t take the opportunity. Knowing that my days are fewer than expected would only cast a sad pall over even the good times.

I’m inclined to side with Miss Emily, but at some stage, after certain questions and revelations, the Hailsham students have a right to know. It would be on a case by case basis.

14. Why do Miss Emily and Madame feel revulsion towards the students at Hailsham? When Tommy and Kathy visit them in Part III, does this revulsion conflict with the morals that the the two guardians explain themselves as having?

I don’t think there is any conflict. When I think of their teachers’ revulsion, I think this is the same sort of feeling people sometimes get when seeing someone on their death bed, or dirty and begging on the street. The revulsion is a defence mechanism, a more basal feeling than other, higher-level and far more uncomfortable feelings such as pity, guilt and sympathy. We are naturally repelled by death, but fascinated at the same time.

15. Many reviews refer to Never Let Me Go as a science fiction novel. What genre would you classify it as?

I’d call it speculative fiction, set in a dystopian, alternative England.

I wouldn’t call it science fiction – although it probably is that too. The emphasis is less on science, more on speculation – speculation of what this same world might be like if cloning technologies were more advanced after the war and if ethical boundaries had been ignored.

16. Were you expecting a happy ending to the novel? When Tommy and Kathy don’t get their deferral and instead are resigned to their fate, are you suprised? How would your experience of the novel change if there had been a happy ending instead?

I wasn’t expecting a happy ending because I’d heard that this is a very sad book that stays with the reader for a long time afterwards. This wasn’t indicative of a positive resolution. Nothing within the novel itself foreshadowed a happy ending.

The Voice of First Person

Here’s what Jonathan Franzen says about writing in first person, and I feel the same way:

Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice ­offers itself irresistibly.

I know people who hate reading novels written in first person. I’m not one of them, but I have a few theories about why this may be the case:

1. They’ve read a few bad books in first person that puts them off reading more.

2. It doesn’t feel as clever. (Like when I watch Shortland Street and I think the acting is really bad because they’re not talking ‘with an accent’.)

3. A general dislike of unreliable narrators (as first person narrators often are)

4. The feeling that first person should be reserved for autobiography

5. The feeling that an author is ‘putting on a voice’ – method acting, riffing another person, whatever.

And here’s my own problem with some stories written in first person:

6. Why on earth is a character like this writing it all down?

The author is faced with an extra hurdle if the narrator is semi-literate, uneducated, non-bookish or generally lazy. See, it takes such an effort to write a book, so a narrator who has never accomplished a thing in his life is unlikely to write down his personal story. Also, to write something worth reading, there are lots of tricks writers use (shifts in tense, flashbacks, set-ups, foreshadowing) and it takes some study before understanding the nature of a story arc.

So, for me, first person narration works best when you’ve got a narrator who is educated, witty, intelligent and able to see a project through. It doesn’t work so well if your narrator is illiterate, uneducated, capricious or partly retarded (or whatever the right word is these days). I don’t mind, though, if the narrator has savant-like qualities. First person narration works well in Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Haddon was very careful to get the voice right for an autistic boy, and it was consistent throughout the novel.

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Making Laws for Clouds by Nick Earls

Another author who writes well in first person, despite the limitations of his narrator, is the Australian YA author Nick Earls. His narrator, Kane, is an 18-year-old sex-obsessed kind-hearted small-town bogan. Here’s the first page:

This is the best summer of my life. This is the summer my mother isn’t always on the bus, and I used to dream about that.

No more of my mother burping and farting and creaking like an old house with all that gas in her. My mother cracking those lame boozy jokes no one gets and smelling something like old fish. She’s a bit of an embarrassment.

My mother sits in the second row on the bus and takes up the whole seat, but mainly on account of her knees. They’re quite far apart, so there’s no room for anyone else. She sits on the window side, but her right knee gets most of the way to the aisle.

It’s the chafing, her thighs chafing. That’s what she says, and she says chafing’s hell and she doesn’t say anything about hell unless she means it. She says if they wanted to make hell hell they could forget the eternal fire and just go for a long hot summer with lots of chafing.

On the first page, Earls has set up a lot:

1. A boy young enough to ride the bus with, and be embarrassed by, his mother

2. A boy who is ‘basic’ (descriptions of burping and farting) but basically kind-hearted. Note he says his mother’s ‘knees are far apart’ rather than that she is terribly fat. We get the sense of a morbidly obese woman, but this is never mentioned.

3. Kane settles for the small things in life. He used to ‘dream’ about the day he could ride the bus about his mother. Later, we find he has a ‘lofty ambition’ to work at a plant nursery, which says a lot about his social class and what’s expected of him.

4. Someone who’s a bit simple. The sentence ‘She’s a bit of an embarrassment’ is a classic author mistake in some respects – unless done deliberately, like here – because first he’s shown us how his mother is an embarrassment and then, as if we don’t get it, he tells us. (In third person narration there’s generally no need to both show and tell.) There’s also word echo with ‘chafing’ and punctuation has been pared back to a minimum. Another voice may well have used a few more commas in there.

But Kane is no writer. Throughout the book, Earls holds back with the clever stuff like metaphors and interesting analogies. Instead, humour comes from observations the narrator might make himself. We’re laughing at him, much of the time, because to this character, it’s perfectly normal to eat spamburgers:

It’s Wayne’s night for dinner and he does spamburgers, which is what he usually does. Cut the right way you get three burgers to a can, so it’s okay. I can smell the spam frying while I’m in the shower.

A narrator like this isn’t the sort to describe the colours of fabrics or the beauty of autumn leaves. This is how he explains the setting:

Most days the breeze, like the sea view, is two storeys up, and we get still air and views of the swamp and the lagoon and the bare patch of land that they used for artillery practice during the war. It had signs up about unexploded bombs until a couple of years ago. It’s now the Recreation Council Camp. They cleared it, but my mother says to mark her words and her wrods are, ‘One day a kid’ll go off in there.’

*

Questions to Ask Before Writing in First Person

1. There should be some reason – at least in your mind – why this story exists. Is your narrator recounting a story for a counsellor? For a friend? Is your story a private journal or a yarn at the pub? Is it a stream-of-consciousness, never written down at all? This will affect the style. We don’t ask these same questions of a story written in third, because telling a story about someone else is a more accepted literary convention.

2. Is your narrator reliable? Does s/he have a good grip on the reality of your story, or is only the reader meant to see beyond the words on the page?

And when you have written the story:

3. Are there places in the narrative where you have slipped out of voice and inserted observations and techniques that would really only be the work of an author? (Otherwise known as ‘authorial intrusion’.) Readers will accept some things but not others. For instance, we accept that novels will be spelt and punctuated correctly even if your narrator is likely to be a bad speller. But readers are less likely to accept other literary conventions:

e.g.

• too much direct dialogue in something that sounds like a yarn (because people tend to tell stories using indirect dialogue: She told me to bugger off.)
• dialogue which is too well done (Is your narrator able to mimic the voice of your other characters, or is that something only you would be able to do, as author?)
• unlikely observations and summaries (Is your narrator the observant type? Would your bogan boy notice the fall of shadows upon fabric? Does your narrator understand other people well enough to sum them up in a paragraph?)

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

Notes on a Scandal is a psychological thriller by Zoë Heller. It is about a female teacher at a London comprehensive school who begins an affair with one of her pupils. The novel was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize.

A film adaptation was released in 2006. The film stars Judi Dench as Barbara and Cate Blanchett as Sheba.

Narration

The novel is written in ‘manuscript’ form. (One of the characters is a writer and makes references to herself as she writes the book.) The (fictional) reasons for this are explained in the foreword:

My naive hope, in acting as Sheba’s spokeswoman, has been to counter some of the sanctimonious hostility towards my friend, and to shed a little light on the true nature of her complex personality. But alas, my contributions have done no such thing. Either they have been cruelly and deliberately distorted, or gone unnoticed in a torrent of lies propagated people who have never met Sheba and would, very likely, not have understood her even if they had.

This is chief among the reasons why I have now decided to risk further calumny by writing my own account of Sheba’s downfall.

I’m not a fan of prologues and forewords when they can just as easily be called Chapter One, but here, a foreword is a necessary choice. The novel is a constant shift between present and past events, and the readers need a summary of events at the start so we know where we are. The foreword also tells us how the viewpoint character could possibly know anything about events she wasn’t there to witness. This is explained by Sheba’s loose tongue:

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi – such an aberration in their workaday mendacity – that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of insincerity is coming on. ‘To be completely honest,’ they say, or ‘To tell you the truth,’ or ‘Can I be straight?’ Often they want to extract vows of discretion from you before going any further. ‘This is strictly between us, right?… You must promise not to tell anyone…’ Sheba does none of that. She tosses out intimate and unflattering truths about ehrself, all the time, without a second thought.’

Since the reader needs to know a lot about Sheba throughout the novel, we can now assume that Sheba has told Barbara, who then writes the entire story down. This is an unusual method of narration but it works.

Setting

North London, winter term, 1996 – early 2000s, at a comprehensive high school and around.

St George’s is one of those safe, soft comprehensives, full of posh children toting their cellos to orchestra practice. But posh parents don’t surrender their offspring to St George’s. The cello-players get sent to St Botolph’s Girls of King Henry’s Boys, or to private schools in other parts of London. St George’s is the holding pen for Archway’s pubescent proles – the children of the council estates who must fidget and scrap here for a minimum of five years until they can embrace their fates as plumbers and shop assistants.

Barbara lives in a small flat, with neighbours who bang on the wall when she wails too loudly. In contrast, Sheba lives in a large house with her husband and children.

Characters

This is an example of a novel in which none of the characters are particularly likeable. Yet it works: testament to Heller’s talent as a writer. It works because the narrator is at once sympathetic and not sympathetic. Although she is fairly odious herself, she is ameliorated by the truly awful people who surround her. When it comes to likeability, even nasty characters can seem okay in fiction when surrounded by others much worse.

Barbara Covett

The first person narrator is a lonely high school history teacher in her 60s. Barbara is an unreliable narrator. Every first person narrator is unreliable to a degree, and it is only as a story unfolds that we learn just how much so. This emulates real life. When we meet a person for the first time, we don’t know how much to trust them at first. We are left to judge for ourselves, after seeing them in action and listening to their own interpretation of events that we weren’t around to see.

At first, I was seduced by Barbara’s sardonic wit. She has captured the setting of a London comprehensive school perfectly, and sums up the characters you’re likely to find there. She sees right through the manipulative, pompous head master (Sandy Pabblem) and reads subtext behind other people’s words. Every now and then she’ll come up with something quite insightful, quite startling, and we realise she is a fiercely intelligent woman. She has obviously had a classical education, with a wide knowledge of the classics, French and Latin.

But Barbara is not emotionally literate. We are drip fed certain details which lead the reader to believe there is a more sinister side to this woman.

First, there is the past relationship with a woman friend who has since broken off their friendship.

Jennifer Dodd…  used to be my closest friend at the school…

But Jennifer Dodd has since left St George’s and started a relationship with a man who won’t let Jennifer see Barbara anymore.

Later, we learn that all of Barbara’s relationships go this way.

As Barbara’s character assessments add up, we realise that she does not like men in general. First she doesn’t like Connolly, nor does she feel any sympathy for him as the underage victim.

Nor does she like the overt masculinity of Bill, one of the stereotyped characters on the staff.

She is jealous of Sheba’s husband.

She disdains the maths teacher who invites her for a drink; nor does she respond positively to the man who offers to buy her a drink while she waits for him at the bar.

Barbara may see through people, and knows how the world works.

In my experience, newcomers – particularly female ones – are far too eager to pin their colours to the mast of any staffroom coterie that will have them.

But none of her social insight does her any good. It is clear to the reader that Barbara is attracted to women, though it is not clear at any stage whether Barbara herself is aware of her lesbian inclinations. She may be well aware of it, choosing to keep it to herself. She uses the word ‘Sapphic’, for instance. But she may simply be reluctant to confront her own feelings for Sheba, mistaking her powerful affections for close, but heterosexual, female friendship.

Sheba Hart

Is an upper-middle class woman whose children are getting older. She decides to join the teaching profession, and begins at a North London comprehensive where she teaches pottery.

Barbara is attracted by Sheba’s beauty, and probably also by the fact that there is a gulliability to Sheba which Barbara can manipulate. Barbara knows that she is intellectually superior to most people, and most certainly to Sheba.

It’s not that Sheba is cleverer than me. Any objective comparison would have to rate me the more educated woman, I think. (Sheba knows a bit about art – I’ll give her that; but for all her class advantages, she is woefully ill-red.)

Sheba is about 20 years younger than Barbara, who assumes a caregiving role towards the end, but in an all-consuming, controlling sort of way.

She’s meant to be taking a nap at the moment. (She’s not sleeping well at night.)

Connolly

Steven Connolly, the15-year-old, is a stereotype. Since Barbara is the narrator, and because Barbara feels no sympathy or empathy for him, we are never allowed inside his head, so he must remain one-dimensional to the reader.

Connolly is average looking, of average intelligence and ambition, has trouble with reading at school, is laconic, and in no way exceptional for a boy of his age.

His upper body had a solid, triangular look. His hands and forearms were unexpectedly large. She could see the beginnings of bristle on him.

Sheba has always maintained that Connolly is a terrifically attractive boy and, to be fair to her, several female newspaper columnists have made observations to similar effect. (‘Glowering and exotic’ one woman in the Mail called him a few weeks back.) I don’t see it, I must confess. I have never been physically darwn to any of my pupils of course, so I may not be the best person to assess the boy’s charms. Yet, I rather think that if my tastes had run in that direction, I would have fixed upon someone a little prettier: a delicate-boned, downy-faced boy in the lower school, perhaps.

In other words, Barbara is attracted by feminine features. She is not attracted to Connolly because she is not attracted to men. But Barbara does say ‘downy-faced boy’, which means she either wants to deceive the reader, or she wants to deceive herself.

This is how Barbara sums up Connolly’s role in the affair:

“The sorts of young people who become involved in this kind of imbroglio are usually pretty wily about sexual matters. I don’t mean just that they’re sexually experienced — although that is often the case. I mean that they possess some instinct, some natural talent, for sexual power play. For various reasons, our society has chosen to classify people under the age of sixteen as children. In most of the rest of the world, boys and girls are understood to become adults somewhere around the age of twelve. . .We may have very good reasons for choosing to prolong the privileges and protections of childhood. But at least let us acknowledge what we are up against when attempting to enforce that extension. Connolly was officially a minor, and Sheba’s actions were, officially speaking, exploitative; yet any honest assessment of their relationship would have to acknowledge not only that Connolly was acting of his own volition but that he actually wielded more power in the relationship than Sheba.”

Heller, through Barbara, is able to see both sides of a volatile and complex issue.

This would have been a very different tale if it had been from Connolly’s point of view. But it is a story about Barbara and her emotional affair with Sheba.

Richard

We don’t get a rounded view of Sheba’s husband because, again, the narrator has no sympathy for him. Sheba insists it is a good partnership, but Barbara assesses that it is not. We are to decide for ourselves.

Language

Since Barbara is an educated woman, she uses language in a grammatically correct way. Her choice of vocubulary alone suggests that she is an educated woman. (bonhomie, coterie, quotidian chit-chat.) At times, Barbaras observations belie her age:

… [Sheba] came through the gates on a bicycle – an old-fashioned butcher-boy model with a basket on the front.

The unreliable narration is particularly subtle at first, leading us ever-so-slowly towards revelation that Barbara is more sinister than she seems. When she recounts her first meeting with Sheba, she appears to describe her in an objective, slightly dismissive way which doesn’t betray her romantic feelings in the slightest:

When she dismounted – with a lithe, rather irritating, little skip – I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material. Fey was the word that swam into my mind. Fey person, I thought. Then I locked my car and walked away.

But Barbara’s choice of metaphor betrays her real feelings:

Sheba’s hair had become more chaotic since the morning. The loose tendrils had graduated to hanks and where it was meant to be smooth and pulled back, tiny, fuzzzy sprigs had reared up, creating a sort of corona around her scalp.

At first read, it appears Barbara does not approve of such a hairstyle for the classroom. Indeed, she does not. But she sees a ‘corona’ around Sheba’s head, reminiscent of an angel.

Just how naive is Barbara, when it comes to sexual matters?

I bought a packet of stick-on gold stars at the newsagent’s. I shall be using these to mark the truly seminal events.

Does she mean ‘seminal’ in the sexual sense, cracking an understated joke with the reader? Or is she as unaware of her pun as she is of her own duplicity? Her obsession with the teacherly gold stars leads us to think maybe she is.

*

Notes on the Movie Adaptation

I agreed with the critics who said:

1. The soundtrack was intrusive

2. The acting was superb

3. Apart from Bill Nighy, who overplayed his character

4. The ending was melodramatic

This was a very good movie and I think I would have enjoyed it more had I not read the book first. Yet it’s always interesting to see which parts are modified for a viewing rather than a reading audience. Here are some differences:

1. There were fewer characters overall. Although they appeared, we never heard from Sheba’s parents, for instance.

2. There were fewer settings. In the movie, the maths teacher visits Barbara at her flat, whereas in the novel, they meet first at a pub and then go to his bachelor pad. I suspect the main reason for this is because we don’t see much of Barbara in her flat, and the viewer gets to see Barbara in her own environment as a stark contrast to Sheba’s upper-middle class home.

3. The ending. The screenwriters changed the ending completely!

Why? Probably because a novel writer is afforded the luxury of interior monologue. The screenwriter only has a very limited amount of voiceover, so in order to create something that feels finished, the movie must draw to a more obvious conclusion.

The Finishing School by Muriel Spark

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In this novel, Muriel Spark takes a swipe at hack writers and aspiring novelists. All of the characters are cliches and stereotypes, working well as a comedic ensemble to convey Spark’s own ideas on writing. We are to read most of this book as irony. Failure to do so would render it dry.

Rowland marvelled as he read her essay. How slick and self-confident these young people were… How they could cover the pages, juggling the paragraphs around on their p.c.s and never for a moment thinking that any word could be spelt other than the way they wanted it to be. Tilly ‘dansed’ with her friend from ‘Nipall’. Why not? Rowland thought. She will always have an editor to put her story straight.

A common but inaccurate perception that editors exist solely to copyedit the genius of writers, who do not need to learn the basic tools of writing, but whose talent is glowing enough to shine through their basic errors.

‘Watch for details,’ Rowland had often said. ‘Observe. Think about your observations. Think hard. They do not need to be literally true. Literal truth is arid. Analyse your subject. Get at the Freudian reality, the inner kernel. Everything means something other than it seems. The cat means the mother.’

A poke at writers who dress plain things up with figurative language which gets in the way of the story.

‘I’ve changed my mind, you know, about the book I’m writing. It won’t be a novel. It will eventually be a life-study of a real person, Chris. At present I am accumulating the notes.’

True writers just get on with finishing what they’ve started. Rowland will never finish his novel because he can’t decide on what he wants to write about.

‘He hasn’t got a publisher yet,’ said Rowland. ‘That’s the sine qua non of a book.’

Rowland’s pompous side is underscored by his use of Latin. He could have said ‘prerequisite’, a perfectly acceptable English term but he must show off his classical education, as many hi-falutin writers tend to do.

Muriel Spark also manages to have a go at publishers who seize the opportunity to publish work by very young authors who have a platform because of their age; talented writers who nevertheless get carried away too soon, wanting their first draft made into a movie; authors who rework the plot of an existing classic; writers who use big words like ‘antiguous’, causing others to look it up; and close-readings of Thomas Hardy.

The Humour

Muriel Spark has a wonderful, acerbic tone and I enjoy her humour because it is not the kind that slaps you in the face.

Nina is conducting her comme il faut class (a class about social etiquette – the French only making it seem more pretentious than it already is). Like Miss Jean Brodie, Nina has firm but very biased ideas about such things, and embarks upon a lecture:

‘Be careful who takes you to Ascot,’ she said, ‘because unless you have married a rich husband, he is probably a crook.’ (As if rich husbands couldn’t possibly be crooks.) … Your man is bound to be a crook, bound to be. It teems with crooks…’

‘My dad doesn’t go to Ascot,’ said Pallas. (Meaning to point out that his father is therefore, proudly NOT a crook)

‘Oh I didn’t say all crooks went to Ascot, only that there are plenty of them at that function.’ (Implying in a most pragmatic way that even though Pallas’ father IS a crook, that doesn’t mean he has to go to Ascot – wonderfully twisted logic.)

But much of the humour comes from the setting – the most pretentious setting anyone could dream up – a finishing school in Switzerland. The formal language echoes the formal, pompous setting. Spark even hyphenates ‘to-day’ in the old-fashioned way.

The novel begins with Rowland opining about how to set the scene in a novel. The novel is written in omniscient POV, zooming in and out from the mind of Rowland, the 29-year-old principal of the finishing school, and aspiring novelist.

Spark makes good use of free indirect style:

It was early July, but not summery. The sky bulged, pregnant with water.

Here, it is not the narrator speaking, but obviously Rowland. Muriel Spark knows that such an image will provoke laughter and she directs our laughter towards her pompous character. This is exactly how Rowland would see the sky, in his melodramatic, overwritten way.

The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

Do you have to like the viewpoint character of a story in order to like the story? This is something that depends a lot on the reader. Some of us can like a story even if we dislike every single character within. Sometimes, disliking a character is, in its own way, one form of LIKING a character. In fiction as in real life there are people we love to hate.

I find Karim Amir, the viewpoint character of The Buddha of Suburbia, entirely unlikeable:

• He’s arrogant.
• He’s morally flexible.
• He’s passive – things happen to him.
• He’s a name-dropper.
• He’s dishonest – a thieving little bastard, given the chance.

His father’s even worse.

So why do I like Karim so much? How did Hanif Kureishi manage to craft an award winning novel, in first person point-of-view, no less, about this slimy little creature?

Humour, I think. As a first-person narrator, Karim Amir has the ability to laugh at himself. The novel is set in the 1970s (and was published in 1990), so we are to imagine an older man looking back with some scorn at his younger self. We, as readers, are allowed to join in. The older narrator (Hanif Kureishi’s unique voice) is extremely observant and funny, which makes up for Karim’s numerous other short-comings.

Not everyone would find this novel funny, but I found it remarkably clever. How did Kureishi do it? What exactly makes him so funny? Here’s my own analysis of it:

1. Keen observations of characters, focusing on their unusual and contradictory behaviour.

Take our introduction to Mr Haroon Amir, Karim’s repugnant but loveable father:

‘…He quickly stripped to his vest and underpants.

“Fetch the pink towel,” he said to me.

I did so. Dad spread it on the bedroom floor and fell on to his knees. I wondered if he’d suddenly taken up religion. But no, he placed his arms beside his head and kicked himself into the air.

“I must practise,” he said in a stifled voice.

“Practise for what?” I said reasonably, watching him with interest and suspicion.

“They’ve called me for the damn yoga Olympics,” he said. He easily became sarcastic, Dad.’

At the most basic level, Kureishi has painted a comical, slap-stick sort of scene. The towel could have been any colour, but it is pink – a feminine symbol. Karim wonders if his father has ‘taken up religion’ – phrased in such a way that he might take up religion as easily as he takes up a sport or hobby. This is even more funny when you consider the title: Karim’s father IS the ‘Buddha of Suburbia’ – an ironic title given that we know, indirectly, from this little aside, that he is not in the least religious. Not really.

We know from Haroon’s sarcasm that we are in for a treat with such an eccentric character and we are; throughout the novel, the father never fails to surprise. Karim, our narrator, sees straight through the irony, and starts to call his father ‘God’.

And Eva, Haroon’s subsequent lover, is introduced like this:

‘…I thought we’d turned up at the wrong place. The only thing she wore was a full-length, multi-coloured kaftan, and her hair was down, and out, and up. She’d darkened her eyes with kohl so she looked like a panda. Her feet were bare, the toenails painted alternately green and red.’

And right away we get the feel for this eccentric woman – a perfect match for Haroon. Of course he can’t help falling in love with her. Notice Kureishi’s attention to detail, right down to the colour of her toenails. Her hair is both ‘up’ and ‘down’ at once; we know it’s all over the place.

2. Slight exaggerations which nevertheless ring true

Karim’s mother is in direct contrast to his father and it’s little wonder they’re about to separate. The father is liberated, free, unconcerned with appearances, impulsive and unreliable. His mother wears ‘an apron with flowers on it’ and is mostly ‘a timid and compliant person’, overly concerned about the neighbours. When she comes into the bedroom and sees her husband practising yoga, she says:

‘”Oh God, Haroon, all the front of you’s sticking out like that and everyone can see!” She turned to me. “You encourage him to be like this. At least pull the curtains!”

“It’s not necessary, Mum. There isn’t another house that can see us for a hundred yards – unless they’re watching through binoculars.”

“That’s exactly what they are doing,” she said.’

In a wonderfully understated way, Mrs Amir shows us that she is paranoid – just a little more paranoid than most real-life examples, but not so wacko that we don’t recognise the mother’s foibles in ourselves, or in people we know.

3. Witty observations, philosophical in nature, that we haven’t heard before. We may have heard similar in others, but these characters twist them somehow.

For example:

‘I’d discovered in life that if you’re too eager others tend to get less eager. And if you’re less eager it tends to make others more eager. So the more eager I was the less eager I seemed.’

Most people’s common-sense says that the more eager you are the more you will encourage eagerness in others, but Karim thinks the direct opposite. This is so amusing because he might well be right. Perhaps we are the overenthusiastic fools.

Other characters surprise us too, with their unusual views:

‘“Don’t show us up, Karim,” (Mum) said, continuing to watch TV. “You look like Danny La Rue.”

“What about Auntie Jean, then?” I said. “She’s got blue hair.”

“It’s dignified for older women to have blue hair,” Mum said.’

4. Simple hyperbole.

‘It took me several months to get ready: I changed my entire outfit three times.’

Understatement is used to similar effect, like when Karim meets Charlie, his future step-brother and lover:

‘… he lowered his head one thirty-secondth of an inch in acknowledgement of me.’

In an instant, we know that Charlie considers himself holier than thou. Also, there’s no such word as ‘secondth’; the word itself has comic value because it’s impossible to pronounce.

5. Original ways of seeing the familiar.

‘I’d washed my face in Old Spice’.

(Karim is not old enough to know how these things are really used.)

6. Comic dialogue

One source of wonderfully colourful dialogue is Changez, straight off the boat from India, brought to London to marry one of Karim’s lovers and make a botch-up job of working in a shop.

‘As Anwar was talking Changez turned to him and said, “I thought it would be much more freezing in England than this.”

Anwar was bewildered and irritated by this non sequitur.

“But I was speaking about the price of vegetables,” said Anwar.

“What for?” asked Changez in bewilderment. “I am mainly a meat-eater.”’

We can tell Changez is speaking in non-native, Indian inflected English. We can tell this simply by the arrangement of his sentences. He also gets his idioms a bit wrong:

‘”You’ve hit the nail exactly on the nose!”’

Changez has an idiosyncrasy in his speech where he often puts ‘yaar’ at the end of a sentence. This all gives him colour and makes him distinct from the other characters.  Note that each of the characters has some object or idiosyncrasy associated with them: Karim is obsessed with tea, Haroon with Chinese paraphenalia, Auntie Jean with gin and so on.

7. Unusual repetition

‘She just eyed me steadily, as if I were some kind of criminal rapist. What was her fucking problem, that’s what I wanted to know.

“What’s your problem?”

“You weren’t there,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. You just didn’t show up.”

Where wasn’t I?

“Where?” I said.

“Do I have to remind you? At the demonstration, Karim.”’

Here, the narrator treats us to some internal dialogue, pre-empting his dialogue which follows immediately after. This lets us right into his mind – we can see how confused he is.

*

These are some of Kureishi’s techniques at the most detailed level. But what mainly makes this novel so funny is the sum total of completely bizarre characters thrown in with each other. We see them interact and react and we see ourselves in them.

That’s why I admire this novel so much.