The Girl Who Became a Beatle by Greg Taylor

Published by Feiwel & Friends on February 15, 2011

The prologue to The Girl Who Became a Beatle contains an apt warning: the novel is a fantasy that requires a willingness to suspend disbelief, to accept the possibility of magic in a fictional universe. If you only like stories that are reality-based, this isn't the novel for you.

Regina is the sixteen-year-old lead vocalist for a pop band called the Caverns. She's in love with Julian, the lead guitarist, but hasn't told him. She's worried that the band is about to break up. She misses her absent mother; she wants to run away. Then one night, after making a wish for fame, she wakes up in a world where the Beatles never existed and the Caverns have soared to dizzying heights of popularity by recording Beatles songs (supposedly written by Regina). As she steps into this world, Regina discovers that fame has changed both her life (which now includes a Brad Pitt type boyfriend) and her personality (she's viewed as something of a diva). As she ponders her new life, she is forced to confront her feelings about her mother, Julian, and (most importantly) herself.

The Girl Who Became a Beatle is like comfort food: familiar, predictable, easy to devour, and maybe even a little nutritious. The novel purports to teach life lessons, all of them pretty obvious: Life is what you make it. True friends are better than adoring fans. Be careful what you wish for. Believe in yourself.

The novel is written in the first person, from Regina's perspective. Its use of punchy sentences and short chapters make it a quick read. Whether the novel will succeed with its young adult target audience is unclear to me. I think it depends upon whether readers accept the narrative voice as authentic; whether they believe it belongs to a sixteen-year-old girl. I'm not part of the target audience (being old enough to remember watching The Beatles perform live on the Ed Sullivan Show) and about the only teenage girls I see these days are at the mall during my infrequent shopping trips, but to my unschooled ear, the narrator's voice seemed to be that of an adult male pretending to be a sixteen-year-old girl. I can't say that made much of a difference to me after I settled into the story, but if teenagers and young adults don't accept the voice as genuine, they might be turned off by the novel. I'd be interested to learn the reactions of members of the target audience in that regard.

Speaking from the perspective of a mature (okay, old) male, I enjoyed the novel more than I thought I would. It will never be mistaken for great literature, but as much as I crave gourmet meals, I'm also a sucker for comfort food. The story delivers solid entertainment and the characters are easy to like.

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Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor

Published by Bloomsbury on February 16, 2010

The police discover Robert's decaying body on the floor of his flat. Robert's friends have been dropping by for a week, leaving after banging on the unanswered door. Robert's friend Danny finally breaks in and discovers the corpse before fleeing in a panic. Danny searches for someone to tell -- Robert's daughter Laura or his friend Mike -- but gives a greater priority to scoring drugs. As the novel progresses we meet other people in Robert's world and learn about his past. We also hear about the wartime experiences of two characters, one of whom became addicted after losing a leg. The novel ends with a coroner's inquest into the cause of Robert's death.

Even the Dogs is a story of wasted lives, of lives spent waiting: for drugs, for government checks, for the soup van, for group therapy to be over, for death. Most of the first part of the novel is told from Danny's point of view. The remainder is narrated by Robert's friends: unseen, ghostlike observers of his death's aftermath. Other than Robert, who drinks heavily but doesn't take drugs, the characters tend to blend together: each is driven by the same desire to get high, each is mired in a dreary existence.

The novel's narrative style is fractured, as are the characters. When Danny is narrating, paragraphs typically end with unfinished sentences. Yet portions of this novel are written in achingly beautiful prose. For that, I recommend the novel, but I can't say that it was a complete pleasure to read. It's important for novels like this to be written, to reflect the dark and dismal realities of life, but dismal reading isn't fun reading. If you're looking for a story of redemption or personal growth, you won't find it here. If you don't want to be depressed by your reading, find a different book. Even the Dogs is a well-written chronicle of hopelessness, but it's a story that has been told many times before. This snapshot of life's forgotten, invisible people is better than most, but for all the power of McGregor's writing, I found myself reading it in small doses and was glad when it came to an end.

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Dog War by Anthony C. Winkler

Published by Akashic Books on June 1, 2007,  first published in the UK by Macmillan Carribbean in 2006.

Precious is 47 years old, content with her life in Runaway Bay and with her marriage to Theophilus. As a dutiful wife, however, she agrees to move to the country so that Theophilus can enjoy a view of the mountains. When Theophilus dies in a traffic accident, Precious must begin her life anew, and she doesn't want to live it in her country home where (despite the company of Red Dog and White Dog) she feels isolated, convinced that rapists and murderers will attack her at night (and worried that her corpse won't be dressed properly when it's eventually discovered). Dog War follows Precious as she tries living in Kingston with her son the dentist (where she is at war with her daughter-in-law) and in Miami with her daughter the cop (where she must fend off the unwelcome attention of her son-in-law) before taking a housekeeping position in Fort Lauderdale. There Precious must cope with a wealthy widow who takes a greater interest in the rights of animals than the needs of people, with the widow's spoiled, amorous dog, and with a chauffeur who is convinced that he is repaying a debt for camels he stole in a life he lived seven hundred years earlier. Despite clinging to her beliefs (reinforced by her consultations with Jamaican Jesus underneath her bed), Precious manages to learn some difficult but valuable lessons about life by the time the novel ends.

Dog War is a very funny book. Nearly every page made me laugh out loud; on some pages nearly every paragraph made me laugh out loud. The characters are charming; to the extent that they are stereotypes, Anthony Winkler somehow found a way to make them fresh. The story is sweet and the lessons it teaches are familiar but nonetheless valuable. The pace is quick and the novel is the perfect length; it tells a fun story without trying to do too much. There isn't anything terribly profound about Dog War, but the novel is meant to make you smile and to nod at its conventional wisdom, not to change your life. On that basis, it succeeds admirably.

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Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

 

First published in 1889.

Three Men in a Boat tells the story of George, Harris, and J., who, accompanied by Montmorency (a misbehaving dog), take a boating trip up the Thames. Narrated in the first person by J., the novel is hilarious, touching, and occasionally profound. The humor ranges from dry wit to slapstick as J. recounts the trio's hapless efforts to row their way up the river.

Digression follows digression as the story unfolds. Passing Runnymede reminds J. of King John which reminds him of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, which prompts him to complain of the nuisance that young lovers make of themselves, which leads him to imagine coming upon Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn canoodling in a royal garden. During the course of the novel, J. turns his attention to the pleasures of food and idleness, to fish stories, to music and dogs and friendship and dozens of other topics.

Although Three Men in a Boat is a very funny comedy, the novel also offers a glimpse of British history as J. comments upon the various villages and towns they pass on their journey (the book was originally intended as a travel guide, a purpose that is hidden in its many levels). J. has his philosophical moments, as well; as they pass a monastery, he observes that the monks, vowed to silence and cloistered in their building so that they can hear the voice of God, are unable to hear that voice in the splashing water and in the wind whispering through the river grass. Indeed, some passages of this short novel are so beautifully written that I didn't want the excursion to come to an end.

Three Men in a Boat inspired the equally funny To Say Nothing of the Dog, a time travel story written by Connie Willis. Readers looking for a more modern version of Three Men in a Boat might want to try Willis' novel. I recommend reading them both for an interesting contrast of perspectives on boating the Thames, and for double the laughter.

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Published by Knopf on September 26, 2006

Cormac McCarthy reduced this story to its raw elements: no names, not many characters, dialog that barely rises above a series of grunts. We don't see the apocalypse happen, we never learn its cause; we see only a journey through a dying world. The Road is a story of survival in desperate times, of a father's love for his son, and of a sort of honor or integrity that the man wants to instill or preserve in his son (represented by the man's insistence that they are "carrying the fire" as they travel down the road). I think McCarthy accomplished the task he set for himself: by telling a simple, elemental story, he got his point across. The doesn't necessarily mean that he wrote a great novel.

These are the reservations that keep me from giving the novel my highest recommendation: I think reducing the story to its raw elements left the reader with too little. With so few characters and so little character development, the story hinges on the man, and I don't think he's sufficiently interesting to carry the novel. The man's character depends almost entirely on machismo: Man strong. Man protect child. Man carry fire. McCarthy's portrait of the ideal man as a strong, silent warrior (represented by the boy's father and by the man who comes along at the novel's end) was just a little much for me. That's particularly true when the man is contrasted with his wife. She's portrayed as too weak-willed to struggle, too lacking in courage to assure her child's survival. Man strong, woman weak: at least that's the message I got. And the "carry the fire" metaphor (in the boy's words, "we're the good guys") was too simplistic to resonate with me. The novel gives us only binary choices: survival or suicide, good guys or cannibals. Reducing the world to a few good people and a lot of monsters might be a useful way of making a point about the difference between good and evil, but the world is a whole lot more complex than that -- and it continues to be more complex than that even in the face of disaster, as the multiple responses to events like Hurricane Katrina reveal. Finally, McCarthy's attempts at philosophy -- the suggestion, for instance, that people who would destroy their planet are unworthy of God -- are stale, recycled from countless other novels.

There is nonetheless much to admire in The Road: vivid writing; beautifully described scenes of desolation; honest depictions of love and fear; the boy's purity as he stands in for his father's conscience; haunting images and tender moments that stuck with me long after I finished the novel. I can't give The Road my strongest recommendation (I actually prefer a more inspirational and, I think, more complex post-apocalyptic novel, The Postman, even if David Brin's writing isn't as powerful) but there are enough memorable moments in The Road to make it worth reading.

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