Review: The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence

Blame Charlotte for this one. Well actually, The Universe Versus Alex Woods is amazing, so perhaps it should be go thank Charlotte for this one. I wasn't going to bother until I came across it in Waterstones and reminded myself how much she loved it. It almost makes up for the time she made me read Hope: A Tragedy. Hey, I said almost.

Plot summary: Alex Woods knows that he hasn't had the most conventional start in life. He knows that growing up with a clairvoyant single mother won't endear him to the local bullies. He also knows that even the most improbable events can happen - he's got the scars to prove it. What he doesn't know yet is that when he meets ill-tempered, reclusive widower Mr Peterson, he'll make an unlikely friend. Someone who tells him that you only get one shot at life. That you have to make the best possible choices. 

So when, aged seventeen, Alex is stopped at Dover customs with 113 grams of marijuana, an urn full of ashes on the passenger seat, and an entire nation in uproar, he's fairly sure he's done the right thing.

For some reason, I'd assumed that The Universe Versus Alex Woods was a fantasy book. Maybe I'd confused it with The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (I don't know how, but the two do meld together in my head) or maybe the word 'Universe' in the title implied cosmic connections. Maybe I'm just terrible at reading blurbs, who knows? In any event, it doesn't matter what my expectations were because the actual book wildly surpassed all of them.

You know when you open a book and a feeling of contentment washes over you, like a little voice whispering 'Yeeeeeeah, we're going to get along just fine?' This book is the epitome of that feeling. I started to read that chatty, rambly tone and was hooked by the second page.

The tone reminds me of a more casual Scarlett Thomas. It's more accessible and relaxed, but goes off on tangents in a similar way. By that, I mean that it feels as though the narrator is actually telling you a story - when a friend sits down across from you in a coffee shop, they rarely manage to give you a perfect timeline of events. Instead they may also tell you some interesting facts about something pertaining to their story or they'll slip in a few irrelevant details. The Universe Versus Alex Woods is just like that - Alex will go off on a tangent to tell us about homeopathy, Tarot cards, meteorites or anything else that strikes his fancy. It never feels like an essay within a book, however; it blends in seamlessly with the story and is always relevant and interesting.

It just works so well. Alex obviously goes through a series of events that are very unlikely to happen to those of us sitting at home, but Gavin Extence manages to make it seem more believable by weaving in little bits of normality. Mr Peterson, for example, writes to Amnesty International as a hobby. It's a very mundane and lifelike thing to do, which clicked in my head as just being kind of perfect for the character. It talks about the normal things that aren't usually mentioned in books and the contrast to the very exotic beginning is wonderful.

It's possible to find order in chaos, and it's equally possible to find chaos underlying apparent order. Order and chaos are slippery concepts. They're like a set of twins who like to swap clothing from time to time. Order and chaos frequently intermingle and overlap, the same as beginnings and endings. Things are often more complicated, or more simple, than they seem. Often it depends on your angle.
I think that telling a story is a way of trying to make life's complexity more comprehensible. It's a way of trying to separate order from chaos, patterns from pandemonium. Other ways include tarot and science.
The moment I'm about to describe is the culmination of one set of chaotic circumstances and the starting point for another. It's a moment that makes me think about how life can seem highly ordered and highly chaotic all at the same time. It's an ending and a new beginning.

I had no idea what the central theme of this book was and it came as a surprise that it was such a serious, controversial issue. Don't get me wrong; it's executed beautifully. It never actually comes right down and agrees with any particular side of the debate, but the author has clearly done an awful lot of research on the procedure and moral viewpoints involved. Why yes, I am being very vague, but in this case I think it's better to read the book without really knowing 100% what I'm talking about. You'll survive.

If I had one complaint, it's that the relationship between Alex and Mr Peterson is supposed to quite deep, but we never really see it develop into that. We're just told that it's there without ever really being shown. It's a minor fault, but one that I think would really have helped us to understand Alex's moral predicament in relation to the last paragraph.

I hate that I'm never going to get to read The Universe Versus Alex Woods again for the first time. There's an odd mix of the mundane and the strange that fits together with the casual tone perfectly. Add that to the hands-on approach to such a huge moral issue and the result is an amazing book that I can't wait to reread.

Read an extract here or visit Gavin Extence's website.

Review: The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho was one of the first books I reviewed for this blog - it's also one of my favourites. I found it to be a moving tale of a young woman's reluctance to persevere with life and I was desperate to read as much of Paulo Coelho as I could. Only... I didn't. I finally picked up The Devil and Miss Prym last week, and although I didn't like it as much as Veronika, it's still well worth a read.

Plot summary: When a stranger arrives in an isolated mountain village, he brings with him a devilish offer: If anybody in the town is murdered within a week, every surviving resident will receive a fortune in gold. His evil instigation throws the townspeople into a moral tailspin that ends with a major plot surprise.
 
It's a very simple concept, the likes of which can be found in any of those 'What would you do?' books. A stranger arrives at a sleepy village high in the mountains and shows the disillusioned barmaid, Miss Prym, a bar of gold he has hidden in the woods and tells her of another nine nearby. She must inform the townsfolk of his offer - if one person in the village is murdered by the end of the week, the village will receive the ten bars of gold. 

This book is based around choices, two of them. The first is Miss Prym's - she can choose to steal the one gold bar she knows the location of and run off to the city to pursue her dreams. This would not only help her live the life she always dreamed of, but also protect her neighbours from having to make an agonizing decision. On the other hand, the more moral choice would be to not steal the gold, and not to tell the villagers of the stranger's offer so that all concerned could preserve their moral integrity. However, should Miss Prym start down this path, the stranger has promised that he will inform the citizens himself and they will likely resent the barmaid for hiding this information and choose her as the sacrificial victim.

The second choice is obviously that of the villagers - whether they should accept the gold offered to them to save their dying village and murder an innocent inhabitant, or let their home wink out of existence, but stay on the side of righteousness.

Paulo Coelho is an immensely talented author who somehow manages to get right inside the heads of his characters. He did it magnificently with Veronika, and he does the same with the stranger who is trying to convince himself there is still good left in the world and with Miss Prym, who is facing the most terrifying decision she has ever had to make. Somehow, nobody in the book felt to me like a bad person - some were unlikeable, yes, but that's a completely different story. I know lots of people I dislike, but aren't necessarily 'bad.' But then, what is 'bad' after all?

To me, the essence of this book is good vs evil, and that perhaps it's not always as clear cut a choice as it seems. And yes, there have been many books on this topic already, but not like this one. This is a very specific, very personal look at what people can do when pushed. Religion occasionally comes into it, as does the Devil, but it's more in a spiritual way than a churchy way.

My only complaint is the 'major plot surprise' mentioned in the Amazon summary. That is to say, there isn't one. Although I admit that this is a fault of the blurb not the book itself, the story does seem to just kind of... fade out a little. It wasn't rounded off as well as perhaps it could have been.

Still, I really enjoyed reading it and I'm looking forward to reading the six books I bought in a Paulo Coelho boxset last week. If you're considering starting one of this author's books, I'd start with either Veronika or this one.

Visit Paulo Coelho's website here, or read my review of Veronika Decides to Die.

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair

It's very likely I may have melted from the heat before finishing this review, so if it trickles off into vague mumbling about deserts, air conditioning and ridiculous dark jeans, you know why. You have been warned.

Amazon - ''Well, I'm glad my little girl didn't snatch and push. It's better to go without than to take from other people. That's ugly.' Harriett is the Victorian embodiment of all the virtues then viewed as essential to the womanly ideal: a woman reared to love, honour and obey. Idolising her parents, she learns from childhood to equate love with self-sacrifice, so that when she falls in love with the fiance of her closest friend, renunciation of this unworthy passion initially brings her a peculiar sort of happiness. But the passing of time reveals a different truth.'

This is a strange little book. It took me quite a while to understand what the point of it really was, as nothing out of the ordinary ever happens. It's, quite obviously, the story of Harriett Frean's incredibly mundane life, from her childhood to her death. However, after roughly 2/3 of the way through, Harriett's perceptions start to slowly shatter one by one.

She is very, very proud of all the 'good' things she's done, like not marrying the man her friend was in love with, moving to the town her mother wanted to, taking back her maid after she had a baby. She constantly refers to these, like she's reassuring herself that she's the good person her parents demanded she be. But then, in later life, she discovers that all these good deeds have turned out to not be the moral choice she'd expected, and that maybe she'd made the wrong decisions after all. It's basically a story of disillusionment - how Harriett's life didn't turn out to be as morally superior as she'd thought.

Once I understood the point of it, I started to enjoy it. Otherwise, it's just a mundane list of a woman's life. Harriett is rather irritating, with her constant self-congratulations and smugness, although I did feel for her when her bubble was burst. I wish that Ms Sinclair had altered the 'voice' of the novel though, as it never changes, whether Harriett is five or eighty. Her opinions progress a little, but her vocabularly and tone never does. It may have accentuated her development a little and so got the point across a little more firmly.

The cover tells me that Cosmopolitan called it 'shocking,' which seems a little over-the-top. 'Sad' perhaps, but 'shocking' is the exact opposite of this book.