The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian is a novel by South Korean author Han Kang, translated to English by Deborah Smith. The book is broken into three parts, all of which were apparently published as separate novellas, before being bound together as a novel.

The first part, The Vegetarian, is narrated by the husband of a woman named Yeong-Hye. He begins his story thus:

Before my wife became a vegetarian, I'd always thought of

her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank,

the first time I met her I wasn't even attracted to her.

                                               

In fact, Yeong-Hye's husband picked her out specifically for her mediocrity. He wanted a simple, unchallenging wife who would make his meals and see to his other physical needs. Thus he is seriously unprepared for the day when he comes home to find her cooking seaweed soup, refusing to eat or prepare a meat dish ever again. What's more, his body's organic meat odour has become disgusting to her. What he regards as his conjugal rights he begins to take by force.

Yeong-Hye begins to lose weight. To questions as to why she has radically changed her diet she answers simply that she had a dream. Her family—and particularly her parents, who find her behaviour puzzling and shameful—begin to pressure her to yield to her husband's culinary requirements, but Yeong-Hye is steadfast in her

refusal. By the end of this section of the book, the tension has mounted to an outbreak of actual violence.

So far this book probably sounds like either a farce or a satirical attack on Korea's oppressive cultural conformity and patriarchal structures. Perhaps it all seems a little absurd (although any vegetarian will be able to tell you about the vast number of conversational strategies we develop in order to avoid having to endlessly justify the tiny difference between ourselves and those we are dining with). Certainly this kind of satirical element is present in Kang's novel, but if there is farce here, it is not terribly funny. And something far more complex and subtle is at work too, as suggested by the occasional insights into Yeong-Hye's thoughts:

Sleeping in five-minute snatches. Slipping  out of fuzzy

consciousness, it's back - the dream. Can't even call it that

now. Animal eyes gleaming wild, presense of blood,

unearthed skull, again those eyes. Rising up from the

pit of my stomach. Shuddering awake, my hands, need

to see my hands. Breathe. My fingernails still soft, my

teeth still gentle.

 The novel's second part, Mongolian Mark, centers around Yeong-Hye's brother-in-law, a video artist with a growing obsession with his wife's sister. He becomes both sexually and artistically preoccupied with the idea that she will feature in his next work. He wants to use her to recreate a vision he has had of two bodies, covered in the images of flowers, entwined sexually. Yeong-Hye is pliable and amenable. She likes the flowers he paints on her body because they stop her oppressive dreams. Although it should be clear to the reader by now that Yeong-Hye's behaviour and thinking is disturbed, Han Kang relates this part of the story from the artist's perspective, such that what happens between the two of them seems understandable and almost innocent.

It's not until the third part of the book, which is told from the viewpoint of the artist's wife, Yeong-Hye 's sister, that it becomes obvious how monstrous the artist's behaviour really is. By this time Yeong-Hye is in an institution. She has stopped eating completely, and sometimes she stands on her hands, believing her fingers sprout roots into the ground.

To a degree, The Vegetarian is a story about schizophrenia—about the creeping onset of the condition, the confused and damaging ways in which people can react to it, and the terrible effect it can have on both the sufferer and those around them. Yeong-Hye withdraws from the world little by little, and is almost wholly gone before anyone really realises how little they knew her. In this sense it is a sensitive and moving study of the reality of mental illness.

But this is really not a book simply about a disease. There is also an element of complete comprehensibility in Yeong-Hye's break with reality, in her desire to turn her back on the animal world and embrace the quiet simplicity of plant life. Her sister, In-Hye, when she looks back across their life together, sees that there were signs even in childhood that life's demands, their family life, her position in it, were too much for Yeong-Hye. In-Hye reflects that with slightly different choices, under changed circumstances, or if her own chosen coping mechanisms had not involved a sense of huge responsibility, maybe something in her would have let go too.

This is one of the best books I've read for a while. For everything I've said about it, I think it is ultimately a book about the sometimes horrific limitations of being a human, and about that sense we sometimes have that life as we are living it is a pale imitation of what it could be. But it is also a book about love, specifically about the bond between siblings; a bond which though it might sometimes feel hopeless, though it might be a source of guilt and sadness, and in this case is a largely tragic one, remains nonetheless unique and often meaningful.

The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard

In an unnamed Republic somewhere in central Africa, by the side of a drained lake, a territorial dispute is gearing up between the local police chief, Captain Kagwa, and a revolutionary Pan African communist called Harare. Harare's militia of child soldiers are regularly treated for sickness and disease by the narrator of this book, one Dr Mallory. Mallory, though officially working for the WHO, has taken over an abandoned drilling project to try to find water trapped under the desert. He has dreams of irrigating the Sahara. When the book begins, the local political situation is escalating on all sides. Mallory is reluctantly preparing to leave the area, but when he dislodges the base of a dead oak tree, water begins to trickle out. Before long, this small stream has eroded the ground both before and behind it and grown into a huge river.

Mallory claims the river as his own. A disgraced TV documentarian named Sanger, who has come to Africa to save his reputation, even registers the new river under Mallory's name. And so begins a hallucinatory journey up the river, on which Mallory sets out with a child soldier called Noon, a 12-year-old girl in an ill-fitting camo-jacket. His motivations are unclear even to him. He vacillates between wanting to save the river and wanting to destroy it, but the goal of the mission is in either case to reach the river's source.

J. G. Ballard started his career as a writer of science fiction short stories and weird, surreal and dystopian adventure novels, but he drifted towards a self-created genre that is now often called ballardian. Ballardian fiction tends to be set in a parallel reality, where the corrosive effects of technology and/or social decline are slightly exaggerated to horrific effect. The most famous exception to this trend is Ballard's most read book, the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, which dealt with the writer's own childhood experiences in WWII China. The Day of Creation is the book he wrote after the unexpected success of Empire of the Sun, and in many ways it is quintessentially ballardian. It looks back to his earlier weird adventure novels, like The Crystal World, in which surreal, transformed landscapes were central leitmotifs, but it also makes much of the unsettling presence of technology. The landscape in The Day of Creation is often strewn with refuse. The arrival, early in the story, of Sanger’s documentary crew allows Ballard to insert Mcluhanesque truisms about how sooner or later everything turns into television. Mallory's journey up the river is made on a car ferry, progressively more junked up with cameras, screens, VHS tapes, as well as a black Mercedes stolen from Captain Kagwa. 

On one level, The Day of Creation is a hugely symbolic satirical novel. There are obvious references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with Mallory standing in for both Marlow and Kurtz. Mallory's belief that he created the river, his naming it after himself, his pathetic attempts to reroute and destroy it, all seem to be insane parodies of European colonialism. Noon, the child guerrilla, becomes obsessed with Sanger's collection of phoney African documentaries, watching their constructed images of African warrior queens and modelling herself after them. She hardly speaks, but instead clicks VHS tapes against her teeth. When she does say the doctor's name she calls him "Doc Mal," as if referring to the illness he represents. As the journey up the river progresses, and Mallory becomes increasingly Humbert Humbert about his relationship to the girl, even their relationship seems to echo the delusional colonialist's distorted view of Africa.

It is often the case that a writer's distinctive features are both their major strength and their key weakness, and that is very much the situation here. I don't know if it is simply because of the myriad contemporary writers and visual artists who continually rip off Ballard (Tom McCarthy, for all he bangs on about Kafka and Joyce, basically grafted Ballard's worldview onto John Berger's G in order to create the formula for his execrable novel, C), but reading Ballard today can feel like reading a parody. If I had to write a treatment for a balladian novel set in Africa, it would be exactly like this book, although I might have missed out the sexual obsession with a child. However, it is also true that Ballard is much a stronger writer of horror and psychopathology than he is a builder of characters or stories. As much as the obsolete technology, descent into amoral madness, murder and social collapse are what make this book recognisably ballardian, and thus a little predictable, they are also where the writing is strongest. In the first part of the novel, Mallory's obsession with the river feels laboured and contrived, and though the story strives to be thrilling it ends up flat and unengaging. As the journey goes on though, as the characters become sicker and and the whole world goes insane, the vision begins to fall in place and the book becomes convincing.

This is probably not a novel for someone wanting an introduction to the author. An easier entry would be High Rise, for example, or any one of the earlier novels. Those particularly curious about Ballard's weird vision of humanity's relationship to technology could do worse than to start with Crash. On the other hand, people interested in reading an alternative take on the European novel set in Africa will probably find The Day of Creation interesting, and I imagine a person could write a Masters thesis on this book's satirical use of colonial imagery. Diehard lovers of the author will find plenty of his trademark idiosyncrasies to enjoy here. Personally, reading The Day of Creation, I mostly wondered whether Ballard's appropriation by other writers and artists hasn't permanently rendered his work a little toothless and boring. 

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

 

Set in 2001, Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is a surreal, insightful, paranoid and funny novel about the time when the Internet started to accelerate its creep into all our lives. Set in New York, the book follows Maxine Tarnow, a Fraud investigator who has lost her licence, as she gets drawn into a web of hackers, left wingers, neo-conservatives and dot-commers, centred around weird goings-on at a tech firm called hashslingrz.

I haven't read Pynchon's last book, Inherent Vice, but I understand it surprised many people . It seems it was a reasonably straightforward humorous noir thriller, while Pynchon fans are used to sprawling, weird and confusing post-modernist narratives in which everything and nothing might be a clue to some vague yet vast conspiracy. With this in mind, Bleeding Edge feels like a combination of Pynchon's older work with some of the tricks he may have learnt from trying his hand at a more conventional genre. The confusing cast of characters, shadowy government activities, paranoid conspiracies and joyously complex sub-plots running through this novel all reminded me of Vineland, but unlike that earlier book, Bleeding Edge follows a single protagonist all the way through, and while the narration is third person, almost everything that happens is focalized through the wise-cracking New-York-Jewish consciousness of our heroine, Maxine.

Pynchon has often been an anarchically comedic writer, and in some ways, Maxine's spunky persona made me wonder whether the author wasn't trolling his super-serious, high-lit loving audience by paying his respects to Janet Evanovich. But Bleeding Edge's protagonist is also reminiscent of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe—a tireless, sardonic investigator in a corrupt world, where the odds are always stacked against the little (wo)man, and where supporting cast members will suddenly turn up dead in observation rooms under swimming pools. In fact, Pynchon seems to be doing for New York in the early 2000s what Chandler did for 1930s Los Angeles. Bleeding Edge lifts the lid on late capitalism to show the grubby reality beneath, where tech firms are laundering operations for Mossad donations, there's no clear line between corporate interests and the CIA, technology is always led by military innovation, and nobody really knows whose side anybody is on.

The term "bleeding edge" appears only once in the text and is used to refer to the most advanced technology: Not just cutting edge, but bleeding edge. However, the title seems also to refer to the ways in which one thing will tend to bleed into another, until all certainties disappear and the question of choosing a side may be moot. Morally guided Maxine finds herself experiencing an unhealthy attachment to a sadistic, neoliberal hitman with a long history of torturing and murdering South Americans in the name of US interests. Deep web application DeepArcher, a kind of metaphysical VR simulator that supposedly operates beneath the surface of the Internet, appears to be a portal of some kind, and may even house the dead. Random number generators cease to be random on September the 11th, and a video appears that apparently shows American agents practicing a dry run on a roof top with a rocket launcher some days earlier, ready to shoot down the planes should one of the pilots bottle out. By the end of the book, the virtual world and the real world have melded together in subtle ways, foreshadowing the way the Internet really would colonise all our lives over the decade following novel's end.

I really liked Bleeding Edge. I love the little details as much as anything: The tech nerd with a foot fetish; the man with a forensic capacity to smell things, whose private hobby is attempting to reconstruct Hitler's scent; the young graphic designer who has spent years and a small fortune trying to get her hair to look exactly like Jennifer Aniston's does in Friends; Maxine's secretary, who almost always speaks in a kind of ironic Blaxploitation jive; the sinister presence of the novel's off-screen villain.

But more than all this, Bleeding Edge is one of the first fictional books I've read that really tries to address the world as it is now. It is a comedy, but it is also deadly serious. In going back a few years to the start of the century, Pynchon is able to say everything about where we are today. It really brought home to me the way in which we are all trapped in the Web; how even those powerful people we assume to be in some kind of control are really just avatars, working within pre-scripted scenarios—as free as the protagonist of a third-person shooter.

The Blue Fox by Sjón

 

Outside Iceland, Sjón is probably still best known as a collaborator with Björk. He has co-written at least one track on almost all of her records, going back as far as her second solo album, Post, in 1995. These collaborations have tended to be more epic in scope than usual Björk lyrics, often condensing landscapes and weird fairy-tale narratives into a few verses with an unconventional but memorable hook line. Perfect examples of this skill are the singles Joga, Bachelorette and Isobel. In his own country, however, Sjón is a well known poet and novelist. He has been publishing for over three decades.

The Blue Fox (origianally called Skugga-Baldur after one of its central charaters) is a very short book. With only a few sentences on many of its 112 pages,  I doubt it would qualify as a novel at all for people who judge these matters by a book's word-count. Sjón learnt his craft as a poet though, and, as his songs suggest, he can do a lot with very little.

The story begins with a hunter tracking a blue vixen through the wind and snow of an Icelandic January in 1883. It's tense, darkly beautiful and faintly ridiculous.  I fully expected that the rest of the book would be a focused account of this chase across the landscape, each detail described in a kind of folkloric hunter-turns-hunted tale set in the storms of an arctic winter. I was settling into this when there was a sudden night sequence in which the fox split itself into four and taunted the hunter in the darkness. And then, before I knew it, the fox got shot, part one ended and the narrative jumped back in time by four days. This is a complex and ambitious book with more depth than many much longer novels. It constantly wrong-foots the reader.

To give a description of the plot, or the implied plot, of this book would be to ruin the experience for others reading it, but I do want to discuss some of the themes. I think this is the only novel I've read that is concerned with the treatment of people with Down's Syndrome. It's certainly the only historical novel I've heard of that has a character with Down's. Sjón introduces the topic in such a way that you start to realise how absurd it is that you never even imagined a character in a novel might have Down's Syndrome, and the little he reveals about this character's life is enough to create a whole alternative 19th Century epic in the mind of the reader. That's not the book Sjón is writing though. Having done just enough, he moves into new territory.

The Blue Fox also made me think carefully about the possibilities for contemporary fiction. It is experimental without being difficult and, more importantly, without pointedly looking backwards to Modernism as so many "serious" writers seem to feel the need to do. At the same time it has an undercurrent of mystical symbolism and bizarre events not so much related to magic realism (a genre I generally dislike), but running closer to surrealism or poetry.  

Impossible and unlikely things take place, but there are many ways of reading this book and a materialist interpretation is left playfully open. To read The Blue Fox rationally would seem reductive though. It would leave the reader with only a catalogue of strange coincidences and events, and that's definitely part of the game the writer is playing. At one point, one of his characters, wasted on hallucinogens at a Copenhagen gathering, stands up and addresses the room. This is his message: "I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!" His friends laugh and call him "a proper Icelander," but his declaration is as good a description as any of the ethos at the core of this little book, which is full of sentences like this one:

Ghost-sun is a name given by poets to their friend the moon, and it is fitting tonight when its ashen light bathes the groves of trees that stand in the dip above the farmhouse at Brekka.

The language is a wonder to read, even in translation. It is, like the book and its concerns, deceptively simple and contemporary without being anachronistic. If I had to find fault, there were one or two occasions when I suspected that Victoria Cribb had translated a concept along with a word in a manner that was not totally successful. When a character gives thanks to Jack Frost for the weather it just feels odd, as if Jack Frost might have been drafted in to replace an Icelandic ice-spirit, but it's difficult to know if this is true and even harder to think of a way around the problem when a writer is making use of local folklore. Aside from that, this edition reads as if the book were originally written in English.

           

I knew when I was reading The Blue Fox that I loved it, but in writing this discussion I have realised how much. I can't decide whether I now want to buy a load more books by Sjón or just read this one again soon, and it is very rare that I re-read a novel. I think this puts The Blue Fox on a list with Generation X, A Clockwork Orange, House at Pooh Corner, Naked Lunch and Lewis Carroll's Alice books. An apparently arbitrary list to be sure, but high praise nonetheless when coming from this reader.

Zadie Smith - 'NW'

I can't make my mind up about Zadie Smith's NW. I know that it's good, that it's a deliberately and expertly crafted work, with engaging characters and a considered punch, but I'm not sure that I really enjoyed reading it, not in a looking-forward-to-taking-the-train-to-work-just-to-have-some-time-to-read-it kind of a way, which admittedly is a measure which points more to a type of reader than it does to a type of book. And I want to write about the book on its terms, not on mine, or at least to declare my terms early on. To which end, and in short, I'm a sucker for an overarching narrative.

But NW is not a conventionally told story. It does not have an overarching narrative, not as such. It is much more a portrait, a landscape rendering of the North West of London, centring on the streets and the estates of Kilburn. At one point the author pauses to offer to her readers, "A local tip: the bus stop outside Kilburn's Poundland is the site of many of the more engaging conversations to be heard in the city of London," and it is I think the pulse of those conversations that Smith tries to evoke in 'NW.' As such it is a portrait too of the working classes who inhabit those streets and estates, and of those that have left, and in this sense it is also a sympathetic, studied celebration of identity.

So, as a portrait NW is excellent. It evokes in three faithful dimensions the noise, the claustrophobia, the breeze-block stairwells, the tube trains and the pubs of its subject, so much so in fact that it is difficult to follow the characters through these spaces without relapsing into memories of similar spaces outside of the book. The trouble is, I was usually more interested in those relapses. It was an act of self-discipline to return to the book. I'm not sure why.

The characters are likeable and all in all suggest a very tolerant and hopeful view of the human race. They all exist mostly in the space between adolescence and adulthood. Each struggles with an existential and indefinable longing for a definable self, and each, so seems to be the point, is ironically defined by the struggle itself. Probably the most endearing of the cast is Felix, a charming, humble "bruv" eager for something better and somewhere different, with a predilection for imagining the future through a movie lens ("Shit like that. Just rolling in his brain"). There is also Leah, a kind-hearted liberal sort ("wide open to the entire world - with the possible exception of her own mother"), and Nathalie, her best friend, an ambitious but lost sort ("wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television"). The are others too, most notably Annie, a rather tragic ("designed for a life that never happened") varicose-veined Holly Golightly who struggles "between the pretence of lightness and the reality of weight." In Annie 'NW' has its most charismatic and challenging presence. She is the one character who exists for her own sake, who doesn't seem to have a point to make, who, what's more, has no interest in having anything of the sort.

The same cannot be said for the author. 'NW' is a fragmentary book with only the occasional nod to conventional modes of story-telling. There is a faint impression of an arc running through each character's section, there are a few poetic coincidences and there is even an end of chapter cliff-hanger. In each case the effect is to create a dissonance, to point towards what the book is not and so at the same time towards what it might be trying to be, what it is or might be trying to say. It's as if Zadie Smith wants to offer us those conversations at the bus-stop outside Poundland verbatim, but doesn't quite feel able to without reinterpreting or sub-titling a few of the more vernacular idiosyncrasies.

The most conspicuously unconventional section of the book is that given to Nathalie, being broken into one hundred and eighty four fragments spanning two or three decades of her life, from adolescence to adulthood. The effect of these fragments is perhaps to echo the disconnections in her life, and to reiterate the idea central to this book, that a life is not a story, and that to search for one is a peculiarity of the modern human condition. And it is a point which is made well, if not too subtly, and if not entirely with conviction.

Perhaps I've been too harsh. Perhaps what I have interpreted here as a lack of conviction (the almost embarrassed look-the-other-way inclusions of the odd narrative convention) is in fact an ironic comment on the point itself. Perhaps Zadie Smith, no different in this respect from her characters, is also (knowingly?) unable to separate herself from a cultural inclination for story-telling, an inclination which seems to have become accepted as part of our psychological make-up. I think this is the point Zadie Smith sets out to examine, and, though I can't say I enjoyed the book, I do think the examination was worthwhile.

Jonathan Frantzen: 'The Corrections.'

'The Corrections' is about a family which is at once ridiculous enough to keep the reader at a healthy psychological distance, and realistic enough to resonate, sometimes disconcertingly, with one's own familial bonds. Each section of the novel (after a brief prologue) focuses on different members of the family. The first, entitled 'The Failure', introduces us to one of the two sons, the adolescent middle-aged Chip. Chip is a Marxist academic, former professor and writer of a screenplay that begins with, "a six page lecture about anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama"  and continues with conspicuously frequent and salacious references to a student character's breasts.  He rails against the cynicism of a consumerist culture, is seduced by a student ("Melissa swung a leg off the sofa and planted a stockinged foot on Chip's leg, close to his hip . . . Through his jeans Chip could feel the deliberate flexing of her toes.") into an Advil fuelled Holiday Inn affair and, at the end of the first section, is aboard a plane to Vilnius where he will defraud American investors. On the face of it then he seems like a thoroughly likeable character. But there is a problem: sometimes he is very likeable and sometimes he is very unlikeable, but rarely at all is he ever anything in between. He doesn't quite fit together. He's not quite three dimensional, at least not all at the same time. He is a dissonant note. But, the dissonance is only really noticeable later on, and is relative to the brilliance with which the rest of the cast is drawn.

The second section, 'The More He Thought About It, The Angrier He Got', a brilliant title and perhaps worth ear-marking for a possible gravestone epithet, is about the other son, Gary, his wife Denise and their children. Gary is a kind of everyman, reminiscent of Heller's imploding bureaucrat in 'Something Happened.' He seems to sink, inch by inch, into a very modern depression, one which he refuses, and one which we, as increasingly incensed, sympathetically incredulous onlookers, also refuse. After all, as he himself acknowledges, "his seasonally adjusted assessment of life's futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit chemically depressed." It is Frantzen's portrayal of Gary's "mental economy", beautiful and skilful, and with both pathos and farce, that for me leaves the most indelible impression, the shape and colour of which I shall remember long after I have forgotten the details. There have been convincing portrayals of mental illness in literature, most notably perhaps Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', but I struggle to think of anywhere else, possibly excepting the aforementioned Heller novel, where the decline or descent into mental illness has been portrayed so impressively. And having lived in London for the past six or seven years, it is increasingly mental illness, in all it's colours and shapes, which for me most defines the human condition. It is what I want to read about, what I want to understand.

In fact much of the book is about the corrections we make to avoid, put off and account for different forms of mental illness, in ourselves and others. Gary corrects his perception of his own place within his family unit. He repositions himself so as to better fit the ideas others, notably his wife and children, have of him. It is a surrender but the alternative is a nomadic isolation and madness by default.  His mother, Enid, similarly makes corrections and readjusts herself accordingly. She convinces herself that Chip is writing for the 'Wall Street Journal', that Gary is her son before he is Caroline's husband, that her daughter Denise is a small-town girl who respects the boundaries of the marriage contract.  Small corrections but cumulatively enough to effect a fundamental shift and upset the balance between the self and everything else.

Enid corrects too her expectations of her husband, Alfred, who spends his days sleeping and disappearing into his blue leather chair in the basement.  Alfred is a superbly drawn character, and, in the grip of Parkinson's disease, the most explicit representation of mental illness. He is ostensibly a loveable, pitiable old man, with familiar and old-fashioned idiosyncracies, but at his core there is an inscrutable darkness which resonates outwards. One of the most memorable sections of the novel is a dialogue between Alfred and his own clammy, spiteful, sociopathic stool:

"Phlblaaatth!" the turd taunted. It had reappeared on the wall above Alfred's bed and hung, precariously, as if flung there, beside a framed etching of the Oslo waterfront.
"God damn you!" Alfred said. "You belong in jail!"
The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drop on the sheets below. "Seems to me," it said, "you anal retentive personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put 'em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail 'em!"

To get away with this kind of thing, three hundred and something pages in, is testament to how completely Frantzen has been able to create a story of subtle resonances, of humour and empathy, and, most of all, of convincing, living characters. This surreal passage does not in context come across as ridiculous, but rather as funny and sad and unflinching. And in that respect, if in no other, this passage, for me, pretty well characterises the book.