Haruki Murakami
… he isn’t a writer to go to for three-dimensional depictions of reality. His characters tend to be variations on a limited number of figures: a passive yet stubbornly resourceful male protagonist; a wife with an unguessed-at hinterland; a kooky, flirtatious, sexually unavailable girl; a mysterious, confident, sexually available older woman; a creepy, slick professional man and so on.
Authors Christopher Tayler
Christopher Tayler’s opinions
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As always, the experience is a bit like watching a Hollywood-influenced Japanese movie in a version that’s been dubbed by American actors. This time, sad to say, it also reminded me of stretches of the second season of Twin Peaks: familiar characters do familiar things, with the expected measure of weirdness, but David Lynch has squabbled with the network and left the show.
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Beyond the nuts-and-bolts level, [Farrell’s] novels have also benefited from changing fashions in Irish historiography and even from a certain absorption into Irishness. Postcolonial studies looks more kindly on him, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have refreshed his ‘unintended topicality’.
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Mantel keeps too close an eye on facts and emotions to make her story an arch allegory of modern Britain’s origins, but her setting of such unglamorous virtues as financial transparency and legal clarity against the forces of reaction and mystification is interesting and mildly provocative.
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Pushkin complained about Byron’s characterisation by saying that he has a conspirator ‘even order a drink conspiratorially, and that’s absurd’. Saturday comes close to something similar—having a neurosurgeon order fish neurosurgically.
Christopher Tayler
1Q84
J.G. Farrell
Wolf Hall
Saturday