Arthur & George - Julian Barnes

I found this fictional account of the lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, the falsely accused man whose real-life case Conan Doyle investigated (leading to the formation of the Court of Criminal Appeal), both intriguing and convincing.

Both characters are presented as fascinatingly flawed, and the young George's complete lack of awareness of any racial hostility towards himself or his father is particularly compelling. Conan Doyle's relationships with the women in his life are equally complex and believable: he adores and is dominated by the "Mam", feels chivalrous towards his "timid, tractable" - and chastely consumptive - wife, and falls deeply in love with Jean Leckie, who he struggles to maintain a platonic relationship with for the sake of "honour".

The novel works very well as an evocation of the period and an exploration of the nature of identity and the shaping of adult lives by narratives learned in childhood. However, I found this book less emotionally engaging than some of Barnes' other work - perhaps because of the knowing detachment with which the main characters are described.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

The plot revolves around a lonely young man trying to come to terms with the disappearance of his wife, and the increasingly bizarre events that he is swept up in by the strange characters he encounters as he tries to find her and save their marriage. Another strand of the book tells some powerfully brutal stories about an old soldier's experiences in WWII and as a prisoner of war afterwards.

The supernatural elements of the story - a pair of psychic sisters, a magic well or two, a mother and son with strange healing powers - become more all-pervasive as the book goes on, leading to the final mythic show-down with the evil brother-in-law. I found this book compelling and intriguing, but ultimately too surreal and disturbing for my taste, and a little bleak.

Watching the English - Kate Fox

This attempt to describe the rules of English social behaviour was an easy but informative read, with some laugh-out-loud funny passages such as the description of the author's "bumping experiments", where she was able to elicit a "reflex apology" from about 80% of the innocent passers-by that she deliberately stumbled into - but only after learning to suppress her own apologies by biting her lip...

I particularly liked the chapter on work - from the "polite procrastination" rule that demands an appropriate period of meaningless and increasingly awkward small-talk before doing anything so crass as actually getting down to business, to the stimulating impact of the "modesty rule" on our advertising industry. Months after reading this, I still find myself constantly reminded of it by everyday conversations that fit her description of "ritual moaning":

"... there is a tacit understanding that nothing can or will be done about the problems we are moaning about. We complain to each other, rather than tackling the real source of our discontent, and we neither expect nor want to find a solution to our problems - we just want to enjoy moaning about them."

The observations on class-indicators were excellent (the section on "the M&S test" was hilarious, and her exploration of the dangerous terrain of choosing a brand of car made me cringe as I realised to my shame that it did actually matter to me if people thought my choice "vulgar"). However, the only slight limitation that I perceived in this book was that Kate Fox herself is perhaps a little too "refined" to describe the full range of English behaviour with the same insider knowledge that she can pick apart the niceties of eating peas on the back of one's fork. I was a little amused by her distinction between "big flashy, show-off cufflinks" (lower-class) and "small, simple, unobtrusive ones" (higher) - perhaps the possibility of a shirt with buttoned cuffs was too shameful to consider?

Throughout the book she identifies peculiarly English clusters of values (fair play, courtesy, modesty), outlooks (down-to earth pragmatic empiricism, Eyoreishness, class-consciousness), and compensating reflexes (humour, moderation, self-deceiving hypocrisy) and links them all to an underlying "social dis-ease". Although no firm conclusions are drawn about the cause of all this, some interesting parallels are made with the Japanese, another culture from a small island that values "negative politeness", i.e. puts more value on privacy and avoiding intrusion than on friendliness and social inclusion.