March 2017: Our next book

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Golden Hill, Francis Spufford

The Wolfon Contemporary Reading Group will next meet on Wednesday, 8 March at the usual time of 7:30pm in Plommer A. All are welcome to come along to our discussion of Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford - the winner of the Costa First Novel Award in 2016.

From Amazon.co.uk:

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746.

One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat pitches up at a counting-house door in Golden Hill Street: this is Mr Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion simmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge amount, and he won't explain why, or where he comes from, or what he can be planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. 

Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
An astonishing first novel, as stuffed with incident as a whole shelf of conventional fiction, Golden Hill is both a book about the eighteenth century, and itself a novel cranked back to the form's eighteenth century beginnings, when anything could happen on the page, and usually did, and a hero was not a hero unless he ran the frequent risk of being hanged.

Set a generation before the American Revolution, it paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later self: but subtly shadowed by the great city to come, and already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love - and find a world of trouble. 

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Please join us for our next meeting in March - the participation of our members is what keeps the Reading Group alive. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.



*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/ 

January review: 'Sweet Caress, by William Boyd

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Book: Sweet Caress, William Boyd


Publication date: 2015


WCRG Meeting: 12 January 2017


Rating: 7


Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group met on 12 January 2017 to discuss William Boyd’s novel Sweet Caress. There was, unusually, general consensus regarding the book with all readers gaining a certain level of enjoyment from reading the book and finding it a quick read.

The narrative moves swiftly along following the life of Amory Clay, born in 1908, and destined to become a photographer. Her life is not uneventful especially set against the tumultuous events of the
twentieth century. She is in Berlin in the early 1930s and is saved from an encounter with Nazi Brownshirts, but she is not so lucky in an encounter with Mosley’s fascists in the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in 1936. 

There were some reservations among readers that Boyd’s coverage of such a wide number of eras and events meant that he did not achieve a fully rounded character in his narrator and that the supporting characters were also not fully fleshed out. We wanted to know more about her gay uncle, a photographer of socialites in the early part of the century who encourages her in her photography career, and more on both her daughters who follow such different paths, as well as other characters who litter the book in a cursory way. Boyd touches on important moral topics such as euthanasia, but these are also dealt with in a somewhat non-reflective manner. 

The narrator's contemplation of death later in her life is really a means to allow Amory Clay a chance to review her own life – the life the reader has also lived through the past 450pp. She sums up her life as complicated, but that it is these complications that make her feel alive. But she also sees herself as ‘a certain type of ape on a small planet circling an insignificant star in a solar system that’s part of an unimaginably vast expanding universe’. This seems a message for us all. 

In the end the view was that it was a perfectly enjoyable read; Boyd rarely writes a bad book, but it left one with a feeling that it covered too much ground at the expense of depth of characterisation. It is, as someone commented a ‘patchwork view of a human life’, but it is a patchwork that does not work as a whole. The photographs were generally thought to be an interesting addition to the book, adding to the idea that it is a memoir, but no one really felt that they showed her to be a good photographer. Another reader wrote ‘I suppose my four adjectives for the book and its characters/plot would be, like some photos themselves: distant, unpersuasive, flat, black-and-white.’ 

In the end the book gained a credible 7 out of 10.

January 2017: Our next book

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Sweet Caress, William Boyd

 

The next meeting of the Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group will take place on Thursday, 12 January 2017 in Plommer A at 7:30pm - please note the change of day. We will be meeting to discuss William Boyd's Sunday Times bestseller, Sweet Caress. 

From Amazon.co.uk:

Amory's first memory is of her father doing a handstand. She has memories of him returning on leave during the First World War. But his absences, both actual and emotional, are what she chiefly remembers. It is her photographer uncle Greville who supplies the emotional bond she needs, and, when he gives her a camera and some rudimentary lessons in photography, unleashes a passion that will irrevocably shape her future.

A spell at boarding school ends abruptly and Amory begins an apprenticeship with Greville in London, living in his flat in Kensington, earning two pounds a week photographing socialites for fashionable magazines. But Amory is hungry for more and her search for life, love and artistic expression will take her to the demi monde of Berlin of the late 1920s, to New York of the 1930s, to the Blackshirt riots in London and to France in the Second World War where she becomes one of the first women war photographers. Her desire for experience will lead Amory to further wars, to lovers, husbands and children as she continues to pursue her dreams and battle her demons.

In this enthralling story of a life fully lived, William Boyd has created a sweeping panorama of some of the most defining moments of modern history, told through the camera lens of one unforgettable woman, Amory Clay. It is his greatest achievement to date.

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Everyone is very welcome to join us for our first meeting of 2017 and we hope to see you for the usual lively discussion and refreshments. However, if you are unable to be with us, please email your comments and scores so that they can be shared with the group.

The book is available in local libraries, and in paperback and Kindle edition from Amazon* and other booksellers.



*Please remember to use the link on the Wolfson Alumni & Development website if you choose to buy from Amazon, as College will benefit from the sale: http://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/alumni/amazon/
 

December review: 'The Sellout', by Paul Beatty

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Book: The Sellout, Paul Beatty


Publication date: 2015


WCRG Meeting: 7 December 2016


Rating: 5.1

Thank you to all who either attended the meeting in person, or submitted their reviews in advance at our last meeting on December 7th, 2016 where we discussed, The Sellout by Paul Beatty.

This book evoked some strong views and a spirited debate. Most of us agreed that the satire on racism was addressing a subject that is still important in the world in spite of the major changes of the sixties in the United States. What we found difficult to accept was the concept of this novel. It won the Booker prize in 2016 so we would expect a structure that makes some sort of sense and characterisation that would arouse the readers’ interest. However, some felt that the characters were of no interest, others found some possibility of connection with the bus driver, Marpessa. The structure that seemed to be offered by the opening court scene, being also the last scene at the end of the novel, seemed not to be used to make any clear point and in fact the novel mocks the desire for closure. ‘Daddy’ the psychologist who gives the narrator occasion to mock psychobabble is against closure, but the book ends with a page entitled ‘Closure’ –‘I’d never understand and he’s right, I never will’.

The book has received great admiration in reviews and in the press commentary for its Swiftian satire and for its outrageous mockery of almost everything that the white middle classes hold dear. Even the residential area of Dickens had disappeared! The Wolfson group mostly found that it was so much directed to an American audience that they couldn’t understand the language or the cultural references and there was perhaps an undercurrent of annoyance with the Booker judges for opening up the prize to the rest of the English speaking world. Here we might have the reality of reverse discrimination where only one kind of whites was allowed before and we now suffer from the opening up to everyone. (We did also acknowledge that other Booker writers whom we had read before were not always easy to read).

Our corresponding members were equally divided and firm in their views with some very positive comments: ‘I love his extended riff on the whitewashing of literature’. Everyone had enjoyed that element but the idea that to understand segregation a black man needs to take a slave and re-segregate a hospital did not seem to most to be enough to fire a novel. One person wanted to switch it off. Another was ‘bored after twenty pages’ and ‘didn’t care enough to continue’. One consequence of the strength of views was that the Americans and one person who had lived in America in our group found the book very funny and really enjoyed the wit and saw value in the satire while the rest were perhaps experiencing being shut out or segregated. At least the novel and the discussion led us to think again and maybe consider whether in the UK we can feel the need to look at our comfortable assumptions.

When we voted, the book was awarded 5.1