Monthly Archives: March 2016

100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, D H Lawrence, The rainbow

The Rainbow by D H Lawrence, 1915

‘The Rainbow’ is an extraordinarily dense, complex novel. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family in rural Nottinghamshire, and contains some remarkable writing. Originally published in 1915 it is incredibly modernist in tone. But it also has, for me, some serious stylistic weaknesses. Of course this will be heresy for any Lawrence adherents, and I recognise it is a matter of personal taste.zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

The novel spans a period from the mid-nineteenth century to just after the Boer War at the end of the century. It portrays the relationships of the family set against the background of the industrial revolution. Tom Brangwen, one of several brothers, falls in love with a Polish widow, Lydia. The conflict in Poland from which Lydia is a refugee is mentioned only in passing, and with the later reference to the Boer war is one of the few real world events that intrudes into the lives of the characters. Lydia’s daughter by her first husband, Anna, forms the focus of the second third of the novel. She marries Will Brangwen, a cousin by marriage, and goes on to have a very large family. The last section of the novel follows Will and Anna’s daughter, Ursula, and her relationships with a female teacher (in what today would be an illegal relationship, because Ursula was still a pupil at the time), and then a Polish soldier.

The novel is infused with Christian sentiment and symbolism, and this is expressed most clearly in the novel’s closing lines, from which it also draws its title:

“She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”

This is a version of Blake’s new Jerusalem, in England’s increasingly dark and unpleasant land, scarred by the impacts of industrialisation.

The portrayal of sex is probably the aspect of his writing for which Lawrence is most well-known. Here he attempts to address the challenge of how to write about sex without using explicit language. Euphemisms are deployed extensively – I particularly liked the phrase “underneath yearnings” (106) and “they loved each other to transport again, passionately and fully” (112). Imagery, particularly of flowers, animals and different forms of heat, flames, and burning is also used throughout the novel to portray sex and sexuality.

“Suddenly, with an incredibly quick, delicate movement, he put his arms around her and drew her to him. It was quick, cleanly done, like a bird that swoops and sinks closer, closer. He was kissing her throat. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were dark and flowing with fire. His eyes were hard and bright with a fierce purpose and gladness, like a hawk’s. She felt him flying into the dark spaces of her flames, like a brand, like a gleaming hawk”. (Notice the change of tense there by the way – from “he put” to “he was”.)

“Feeling herself lying open, like a flower unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent with demand…The warmth flowed through her, she felt herself opening, unfolding, asking, as a flower opens in full request under the sun.…When she opened and turned to him…she was as new as a flower that unsheathes itself and stands always ready, waiting, receptive.”  (34)

Later, when Ursula is considering having sex with Skrebensky, Lawrence’s use of the flower as a metaphor for female sexuality becomes more explicit –

“Here she would open her female flower like a flame, in this dimness that was more passionate than light”.

Male sexuality is more directly treated, although again symbolism often takes the place of direct description:

“She went down with him into the warmish cellar, where already in the darkness the little yellow knobs of rhubarb were coming. He held the lantern down to the dark earth. She saw the tiny knob-end of the rhubarb thrusting upwards upon the thick red stem, thrusting itself like a knob of flame through the soft soil.”

Lawrence’s attempts to write about female sexuality are certainly bold. His portrayal of a lesbian relationship in particular would undoubtedly have been shocking to a contemporary audience. Despite his efforts (to write about sex without using explicit language) ‘The Rainbow’ was on publication judged obscene, and banned. It is still to this day shocking that copies of the novel were burned by the authorities in 1915 in scenes that pre-figured the Nazi book burnings of the 1930’s. It is likely that the anti-war sentiments expressed in the novel by Ursula were a contributory factor in the decision to ban the book – airing anti-war arguments in 1915 was a brave move by any standards.

Flowers and flower imagery dominate throughout the novel – daffodils, primroses, snowdrops, bluebells, harebells, jasmine, yellow crocuses, peaflowers, geraniums, Christmas roses, and on and on in profusion. When he gets it right there is a luxuriance to Lawrence’s writing that is almost intoxicating:

“The dim blue-and-gold of a hot, sweet autumn saw the close of the corn harvest. To Ursula it was as if the world had opened its softest pure flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron. The sky was blue, and sweet, the yellow leaves down the lane seemed like free, wandering flowers as they chittered round the feet, making a keen, poignant, almost unbearable music to her heart. And the scents of autumn were like a summer madness to her. She fled away from the little, purple-red button chrysanthemums like a frightened dryad, the bright yellow little chrysanthemums smelled so strong, her feet seemed to dither in a drunken dance.” (208)

So what are the negatives? Firstly, there is Lawrence’s propensity for hyperbole. For my taste, ‘The Rainbow’ is massively over-written. Characters hate one another with a passionate intensity, then moments later love one another with an eternal unfulfilled longing. Everything is expressed in sudden absolutes that change just as easily.

“A shiver, a sickness of new birth passed over her, the flame leaped up him, under his skin. She wanted it, this new life from him, with him, yet she must defend herself against it, for it was a destruction” (23)

After a while this gets tiring and tedious. Or as Lawrence would say, his heart achingly rejected it with a passionate urgency that seemed to overwhelm his soul – he hated it and loved it and hated it. And so on.

Secondly, not since the ‘Deathly Hallows’ have I read a book more desperately in need of a good editor. Lawrence uses repetition relentlessly, like a sledge hammer. Nothing is said well enough that it cannot benefit from a second or third repetition. Examples are spread across every page, but for instance see this from pages 180/181:

“In spite of herself the tears surged higher, in spite of her they surged higher. In spite of her, her face broke. …she did not forget, she did not forget, she never forgot”.

As I have written elsewhere, each instance of repetition can in isolation be justified – here the character is repeating these phrases to herself to try to persuade herself not to cry, and once having cried, to remember the wrong done to her. But the cumulative impact of this repetition is oppressive.

Lawrence is an important writer, and his inclusion on the Guardian’s 100 best novels list is certainly justified. But I wish he had had a good editor.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta, The Sun Also Rises

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, 1926

The name of this novel has a complex history – at one stage it was going to be called, among other things, ‘The Lost Generation’ – and this alternative title, together with the epigraph from Ecclesiastes, beginning “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” provide some useful guides to interpreting this novel. yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Set in the 1920’s in Paris and Spain, the events of the novel are shown from the viewpoint of the central character, Jake Barnes. Barnes recounts what happens in the moment, but he never explains – only context and snatches of conversation provide clues to the characters’ backstories. We can gather, for example, that Barnes was a combatant in the First World War, and that during that conflict he received a wound, physical or psychological, which made him impotent. Barnes is besotted with Lady Brett Ashley, a young woman who is part of the hard-drinking crowd who haunt the bars and clubs of Paris. No-one seems to work – Barnes is ostensibly a reporter for an American paper, but we hardly ever see him do any reporting, and he takes several weeks off without repercussions.

It is reasonable to infer that Barnes’ impotence, combined with his lust for Brett, would torture him, but only glimpses of this are offered to the reader. He compensates for his feelings by assisting Brett in conducting her affairs – for a woman of the 1920’s she is very liberated, and quite guilt free and open about her relationships. In a rare moment of introspection Barnes chastises himself, saying

“Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right.”

The second section of the novel moves to Spain, and a fishing expedition is followed by the fiesta of the title in Pamplona, including the bull run and some of the scenes of bull-fighting for which Hemingway is probably best known. With Barnes’s connivance, Brett seduces the 19 year-old matador, and in a jealous rage one of her recent former lovers beats him (and Barnes) up. The novel ends shortly after the fiesta, with Barnes and Brett spending time together in Madrid, and wondering how their relationship might have developed had he not been afflicted:

“Oh Jake,” Brett said, “We could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

(The mounted policeman’s raised baton proving a somewhat unnecessary piece of symbolism there I think. )

As an evocation of the fascination of bull-fighting, the scenes towards the end of this novel are unparalleled. If one is already disgusted by bull-fighting there will be nothing here to change ones mind. The portrayal of the hedonism of  Barnes and his group of friends, representatives of a lost generation, reminded me of an expatriate version of ‘Vile Bodies’. Another text worth comparing this novel to is of course Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’. which in a different setting has similar themes. The reader is invited to see this group of characters as resilient survivors of the fracturing of society which is slowly healing, as the sun also rises. xxxxxxxx

But. There are some issues with the novel that I wanted to explore. The first is the use of repetition. At times it is quite oppressive. I know drunk people – and many of the characters are pretty much permanently drunk – repeat themselves a lot. But it’s not much fun to read. Here’s a random example:

“Brett put her hand on my arm. 

“Don’t get drunk, Jake’ she said. ‘You don’t have to’. 

‘How do you know?’

‘Don’t’, she said. ‘You’ll be all right’. 

‘I’m not getting drunk’  I said. ‘I’m just drinking a little wine. I like to drink wine’. 

‘Don’t get drunk’, she said. ‘Jake, don’t get drunk’. 

In context, each repetition is justified and legitimate – here the effect is to emphasise both the drunkenness of the pair, and the lack of real communication between them. But the cumulative effect is somewhat wearing.

Secondly there is Hemingway’s famously sparse style. In Hemingway the quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog – the fox jumps over the dog. In theory this should make the novel very simple to read – but avoiding over elaborate description is one thing, and stripping the prose to its bare bones whereby one thing happens, then another thing happens, and so on, combining to deadening effect, is another. As a result although it is only just over 200 pages long this novel took me several days to complete.

Third, Barnes’s group of expatriate friends are an unpleasant bunch. They are openly anti-semitic, and the novel contains several derogatory references to homosexuality. These of course were much more acceptable attitudes than they are today, but the casual use of the n-word in a text only 90 years old isn’t reflected in the novels of many of Hemingway’s contemporaries.

Finally, the elephant in the room (metaphor deliberately mis-chosen) is the topic – bull-fighting. Hemingway glamorises the killing of animals for sport, and while this once may have seemed acceptable, today it leaves a bad taste.

As a postscript, and to be completely honest something of a boast, I spotted a fleeting reference to Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ here. On page 66 of the Vintage edition, (which by the way contains an extraordinarily self-indulgent introduction by Colm Toibin which is all about Colm Toibin, and barely mentions the novel it is introducing), Barnes mentions a friend who is a taxidermist. Bill, another friend, replies

“That was in another country…and besides all the animals were dead”. The full quote from Marlowe is:

“Thou hast committed fornication: but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”

This so far as I can tell isolated example of wit from Bill is of course a reference to Brett.

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Amongst Women by John McGahern, 1991

Michael Moran, the patriarch at the heart of this novel, is a depressing misanthropic monster. He abuses his children, terrorises his wife, and attempts (ultimately unsuccessfully) to control every aspect of their lives, all the while ensuring that his interests and comforts are catered for:

“Anything easy and pleasant aroused deep suspicion and people enjoying themselves were usually less inclined to pay attention to others” (61) (others here being Moran himself.)

Amongst womenWhen Moran dies at the end of the novel his family finally experience a sense of relief from his omnipresent oppression. This relief is possibly a false dawn, as his influence continues to linger:

“as they left him under the yew, it was as if each of them in their different ways had become Daddy.”

The novel is set in rural Ireland in the 1950’s or 60’s. The exact date is not specified, but can be inferred from the changes in society affecting Ireland, as well as the ages of the characters in relation to some of the historic events mentioned, specifically  the Irish war of independence. The Moran family in addition to Michael, the father, includes his three daughters, two sons, and their stepmother. We are never told about their mother, who is never referred to or hinted at. Given the veneration by Irish Catholics for the role of mothers in the family, this is surprising.

The novel opens with Moran being cared for by his daughters, who have put their busy lives in Dublin and London on hold. To cheer him up, a thankless task if ever there was one, they decide to recreate ‘Monaghan Day’, a family celebration when Moran’s friend McQuaid used to visit and they would reminisce about the war. Without McQuaid to participate there seems little point in this, and it is really just an excuse for the narrator to tell us in flashback some of Moran’s back story. We are told that he fought as an officer in the Irish Republican Army, and in the Irish Civil War that followed (we are not told on which side Moran fought in the Civil War, but can infer that he was a loyalist). Moran is bitter about the direction Ireland has taken post-independence, and petulantly refuses his soldier’s pension. The main narrative focus of the novel is the teenage years and early twenties of the children, as they grow up and leave home. Moran’s violent outbursts towards his family and his control freakery, often exercised through obsessive repetitions of prayers, gradually drive them all away, although they all, except Luke the eldest, regularly return thereafter to the family home. They are pathetically grateful for any acts or signs of tenderness from their father.

This is all well done – the portrait of an abusive, dysfunctional Irish family is convincing. But is it enjoyable? Hardly. It tells us little we do not already know about this society, which even when this novel was written was fading into the past. It was a time of widespread and institutionalised physical and sexual abuse, unpredictable violence, and the tyranny of men over women. McGahern seems ambivalent about this period, and about his central character, perhaps from a sense of nostalgia about his own past. While well written the novel contains too much repetition for my taste – endless scenes of family prayers and haymaking – and much of the heavy-handed symbolism was sign-posted clumsily. It came as more of a relief than anything else when Moran was finally laid to rest.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1926

Virago Modern Classics have done the reader no favours in managing expectations by publishing this in a twee edition illustrated with a strangely distorted ginger cat, and a quote from John Updike, author of yesterday’s reviewed novel, describing this as “witty, eerie, tender”. (How many times have you said to yourself, “You know what I need to read right now is a funny but scary but romantic novel”?)

The eponymous Lolly, a childish transliteration of Laura, is a prosperous young woman. The first third of the novel follows her very conventional background and birth, and in a fractured time scheme that must have felt very modern in the 1920’s takes the reader up to Lolly’s 47th year. Her family have long since attempted to marry her off – one suitor is dismissed with a joke about werewolves. The company of men -as potential husbands anyway – leaves her cold. She prefers wandering the more obscure parts of London looking for herbs to turn into medicines. One day she has an epiphany, and decides to break free from the patriarchal forces that have been suffocating her, and go and live alone in a small village in the middle of nowhere. Here she begins to breathe at last, but her peace is short-lived, because a visit from her nephew Titus quickly comes to feel like an invasion.

And this is where the novel takes an unexpected turn. Having been quite naturalistic for three quarters of the story, Townsend Warner introduces the occult. More specifically Lolly becomes a witch, and shortly thereafter meets Satan. This development isn’t quite as sudden as I have suggested – looking back over the text there are clues that the village of Great Mop is not the rural backwater it seems on the surface – but it is a strange turn of events nonetheless. Satan is a genial chap, whose idea of supreme evil extends as far as stinging Titus with wasps, and making his milk go off. Titus flees Great Mop, happily engaged as it happens, and the novel ends with Lolly looking forward to a long career of witchcraft, presumably fairly relaxed about the eternal damnation that will follow shortly thereafter.

The allegorical intent of the novel is not hard to decode. As is often the case, sex is at the root of it all. ‘Lolly Willowes’ is at once a manifesto for the liberation of women from patriarchy, with witchcraft being the symbolic representation of the rejection of control of women by men, but also a more subtle plea for the right of women to control their own sexuality. Lolly begins to discover her long dormant feelings when she moves to the countryside and starts to commune with nature:

“In February came a spell of fine weather. She spent whole days sitting in the woods, where the wood-pigeons moaned for pleasure on the boughs. Sometimes two cock birds would tumble together in mid air, shrieking and buffeting with their wings, and then would fly back to the quivering boughs and nurse the air into peace again. All around her the sap was rising up. She laid her cheek against a tree and shut her eyes to listen. She expected to hear the tree drumming like a telegraph pole. (page 110/111)

Admittedly there are phallic symbols aplenty here, but look at the verbs – moaning, tumbling, shrieking, buffeting, quivering, rising, drumming – this is an extraordinarily physical experience for someone just sitting still.

The novel’s climax is a witches’ Sabbath, which threatens to end in a Bacchanalian orgy – “They whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction … contact made her tingle from head to foot…like a torch she was handed on from one to another…partners came and went, figures and conformations were in a continual flux…sometimes the dancers were coupled” (159/160). This scene is followed by a more reflective conversation between Lolly and a very gentlemanly Satan, dressed as a gamekeeper, her very own Mellors. Lolly explains her conversion to witchcraft in a quite sad, melancholy speech, only some of which I can offer here:

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others….That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure… When I think of witches I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men…there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishclothes on currant bushes, and for diversion each others silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen”.
There definitely is a poignancy and tenderness to this unexpected ending to what starts as such a conventional novel. Once I had taken time to comes to terms with the subversion of my expectations about the direction and tone of the novel, I liked it!
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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Uncategorized

Rabbit Redux – John Updike – 1971

The Penguin Modern Classics editions of Updike’s Rabbit quartet (Run, Redux, Rich, and at Rest) contain an afterword by the author which in some ways makes the reviewer redundant, offering insight into the composition of the novels to which few could hope to achieve. Of course, I am going to have a try.

Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle aged, blue-collar AmericZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZan. His wife is sleeping with a work colleague, and soon leaves Rabbit and his teenage son Nelson. Harry is in a dead end job as a print-setter, which even in 1969, the novel’s setting, was clearly becoming obsolete. The reproductions of Harry’s set type which appear in the novel are cruelly riddled with errors, suggesting he isn’t even any good at his job. While the narrative point of view is largely Harry’s/Rabbit’s, we do not gain much insight into his feelings. He seems to take his wife’s betrayal in his stride, although it obviously hits him harder than he realises, as is shown later in the novel when his behaviour begins to get more erratic. Invited out by a work colleague, a black man who Harry would normally not associate, Harry picks up Jill, a wealthy 18 year old young woman fleeing suburban Connecticut. Although more like his lost daughter than a replacement wife, she moves in with him and Nelson. Later her  ‘friend’ Skeeter, a radical Vietnam veteran follows her and also moves in, causing scandal in the neighbourhood.  While Harry and Nelson are out visiting friends the house suffers an arson attack, and Jill is killed. Finally, in the aptly named Safe Haven motel, Harry reconciles with his wife, after a fashion, and they fall asleep together.

The period setting of the novel provides an important backdrop to its events. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon – Harry watches the landing on a fuzzy black and white television in his mother’s bedroom. Race riots break out across America, and the war in Vietnam continues to divide the country. Harry is defiantly conservative in the face of several protest voices, not least Skeeter, who challenges him on issues of race and the war.

It has to be said that Harry is not a pleasant character. He is unashamedly racist, sexually exploits the clearly vulnerable Jill, who is half his age,  and takes pleasure from hurting her during sex. He beats his wife when he finds out she has been unfaithful, and is a poor father. He has many other faults which I am not going to spell out here – suffice to say he is a hard hero to like.

It’s equally hard to avoid the simple reading of this novel that has Harry as an extended metaphor for America. Updike specifically invites this comparison in his afterword – “The character of Harry Angstrom was, for me, a way in – a ticket to the America all around me.” Skeeter’s “invasion” of Harry’s home, hard to understand otherwise, is representative of the rise of black power in America, the intrusion of what Harry/Updike sees as an alien race. His values – paternity, patriotism, fidelity – are under attack from all around. In other words this is a deeply conservative novel in which Harry struggles to at first resist, then come to terms with the changes sweeping America in the late 60’s. He is a victim throughout the novel, weakly accepting what happens to him, not challenging his wife’s lover when he confronts him, taking redundancy without complaint, even spinelessly accepting Skeeter’s moving into his house and sleeping with Jill – he doesn’t like it, but he can do nothing about it. He has a sharp tongue towards his family and friends, but is a profoundly weak man. The reader feels sorry for Harry, perhaps, but that’s the extent of it.

Reading the second novel in a quartet is not the best way to approach a writer’s output (I started the Harry Potter series by reading The Goblet of Fire, stupidly) but I am torn on whether I want to read more about Rabbit. What might bring me back, one day, is Updike’s undoubted way with a sentence:

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation”.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review

The Heat of the Day –Elizabeth Bowen – 1948

Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Heat of the Day’ has strong echoes of Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Affair’. It is set in London during the second world war, where tHeathe threat of sudden death from the Blitz leads to people to live their lives with a sense of urgency. Bowen’s evocation of life in London during this period is one of the strongest features of this otherwise flawed novel:

“The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain”. (10)

“Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling”. (114)

“Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire–nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated to the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else.”

Bowen’s language, and in particular her sentence construction, is interesting. At first you wonder whether English is her first language, given how unnatural some sentences sound:

“The restaurant at which they met most often was this morning, he was sorry to tell her, closed.”(115)

Would not that sentence have flowed more naturally with the words “was” and “closed” together, for example

“The restaurant at which they met most often was closed this morning, he was sorry to tell her” or

“The restaurant at which they met most often, he was sorry to tell her, was closed.” Or even

“He was sorry to tell her that the restaurant at which they met most often was closed”

But it is a fair assumption that writers do things like this for a reason. In this case I am sure that the impact this slightly awkward sentence construction had on me, which was to read the sentence twice or more, was deliberate. This technique is intended to keep the reader focussed, preventing them from reading passively. I have a vivid memory of Kingsley Amis doing this in a novel of his which I haven’t read for a long time, but must revisit, ‘The Green Man’. Anthony Burgess does the same thing in one of his Enderby novels when he brilliantly constructs a sentence in which the word “onions” is repeated four times, but which remains syntactically correct. Coming back to ‘The Heat of the Day’ for a moment, Bowen also conveys the hesitancy of her character with this technique.

Probably the weakest, least interesting aspect of the novel is the contrived, unconvincing, plot. Stella Rodney, a middle-aged woman who works for the government, is propositioned by Harrison, a shadowy figure who seems to be in love with her. Harrison tells Stella that her boyfriend/lover, Robert Kelway is spying for Germans. He promises not to report Robert if she becomes his lover. This sordid proposition forms the core of the narrative – Stella cannot decide whether to take Harrison seriously or not, so extraordinary is his proposal. While she thinks it over, we are told in flashback of the first time she met Harrison, at the funeral of a relative who has left his substantial property in Ireland to her son, Roderick, who is now in the Army. Eventually, after a trip to the estate in Ireland, Stella asks Robert about Harrison’s accusations – he of course denies the accusation, and then proposes to her. However, we later find out that the accusation is true – Robert is a German spy, even though he was wounded at Dunkirk. He confesses all to Stella, and in an attempt to escape from her flat falls from the roof and is killed – the novel deliberately leaves it ambiguous as to whether this is an accident or suicide. The novel then quickly draws to a close with an overview of the next few years of the war and a fast forward summary of the lives of the main characters. The subplot involving a working class girl, Louie, is horribly patronizing – I was not sure if Louie was intended as comic relief in contrast to the well bred Mrs Rodney, but the tone of these scenes was unconvincing.

Bowen is a good stylist (for example, this sentence jumped out at me ““Vegetables of the politer kind packed the curves of crescent and the points of stars” (125)), although occasionally her writing is overblown. But the plot is weak – the reasons for Kelway spying for the Germans are unconvincing, and his behaviour when he is exposed – going to his family home for a long and pointless (and possibly intended as comic?) discussion about its sale is bizarre. The elusive Harrison is equally unconvincing. His interest in a relationship with Stella, for which he is prepared to turn a blind eye to Robert’s spying, surely another form of treason, is pursued in a very lacklustre way – having raised the question with her he then leaves her alone for several weeks to mull it over. Bowen seems to recognise this weakness when she writes:

“By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character “impossible” – each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.”

The Vintage classic edition I read this in quotes the Los Angeles Times as describing this novel as “intelligent noir” and that it “fills the reader’s heart with dread”. I thought it was entirely lacking in suspense or menace, but the fact that this is the best quote they could find about the novel probably tells its own story.

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Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, 1726

I’ve written at length in this recent series of posts about the gap between the perception of novels in popular culture, and the books themselves. ‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ has probably suffered the most in this regard, or had the longest journey, in that the coruscating satire has been recast over the years as a children’s book. It is utterly futile to think of this transformation as being either a good or bad thing – it is just what has happened, and there is clearly a children’s book within the pages of this novel. But if it is seen as simply that, then what a shame.

‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ should be a set text for every GCSE student. It should be read by politics, history and literature undergraduates as well. It is a breathtakingly brave polemic. I last read the novel a few years ago, but rereading in recent days I was struck by the vigour of the satire, the ferocity of Swift’s anger. He tears his targets apart in a way that even today is rarely seen, when we think of ourselves as being much more open and challenging, but still pull our punches and avoid saying the unsay-able, steering away from taboo subjects in a way Swift fearlessly refuses to do.

No-one escapes his attention and criticism. The king of Brobdignag, the land of the giants, having heard Gulliver’s naively damning description of his home,says

“I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.” 

I don’t think anyone has ever captured the futility of political discourse more effectively than the paragraph describing the disputes between the Big- and Little-Endians.

“It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden”

That’s pretty much it, one short paragraph on the topic, but in these lines how much of human folly is portrayed? Political and religious disputes are exposed as the nonsense they are. Gulliver’s Travels is sometimes described as a narrow political satire in which direct parallels between contemporary events and characters and those in the novel are found. This I think places unnecessary constraints on the text – there is a universality to this portrayal of human folly.

If the satire in Lilliput and Brodbignag is relatively benign, the ferocity steps up a notch when Gulliver returns to sea once more (these are a series of separate voyages, between each of which Gulliver returns to England and visits his family, and is then tempted back to sea) and he meets the peoples of Laputa. I have used the phrase “fizzing with ideas” in previous blog entries about some other writers, but never has it been more appropriate – the ideas fly past with extraordinary speed, breathlessly, with little time to consider the wonderful invention and humour before the next is upon us. It’s not all relentless mocking of the absurdities of modern life – the chapters on the immortal men and women are quite haunting, and to this day have given me a different way of thinking about death. Yes, it’s that profound. In a ‘children’s book’.

It is really not until the extraordinary final chapters describing Gulliver’s time in the land of the Houyhnhnms where the  intensity of the satire reaches its full pitch. Ruled by a race of intelligent horses which possess all the virtues man lacks, these chapters principally consist of Gulliver describing England (and Europe) to his master. Simply through this description, and the horse’s occasional observation, the whole of society is damned. Take this description of the law for example:

“Judges… are picked out from the most dexterous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.”

Or international relations:

is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve.

Or finally, and possibly most damningly of all, for a country still priding itself on the expansion of its empire, we have this description of colonialism:

a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!”

Again this is just one paragraph, but is there anywhere a better indictment of imperialism?

It’s hardly surprising that this novel was published anonymously at first. If a modern version was published today the author would be vilified and almost certainly prosecuted. But the concept of a modern version of the text is probably nonsense – the universality of Swift’s themes means that this novel is quite timeless.

Just by way of a postscript, we think of 17th and 18th century novels as quite prudish, but that is completely wrong. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is surprisingly scatological. Gulliver is one of the few figures in fiction who needs to go to the toilet – in almost all books (and films) this simple universal need is politely ignored. This isn’t just for comic effect, as when he puts out the fire in Lilliput, funny though that is, but also as a part of making Gulliver a believable human character.

Finally, I bring you another delight from Amazon’s one star review selection, commenting on how easily Gulliver seems to recover from the various shipwrecks he endures: “It all seems too good to be true”.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 19th Century literature, American literature

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850

Hester_PrynneHawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is arguably the first classic of American literature. While the language Hawthorne uses is often archaic, this is in fact an astonishingly modern novel in its treatment of its subject matter, and in its construction. While the plot is quite straightforward, and the cast of characters limited, behind this relative simplicity is a novel of huge complexity and subtlety.

The novel is told by an anonymous narrator, who in a long introduction tells us the story on found contemporaneous records. ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is set in 17th century Puritan New England, and follows the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman found guilty of adultery. As punishment, lenient given the statute at the time, Hester is required to wear a scarlet “A” on her clothing. Thus is introduced the novel’s most powerful symbol. In an act of defiance, Hester embroiders the letter richly and lavishly, suggesting that the punishment can also be worn with pride. She refuses to hide the letter, and continues to wear it long after it is necessary.

Despite pressure from her judges, Hester refuses to name her child’s father. The paternity mystery is not really the focus of the novel – we are never told how her romance with her lover developed, and there is no great moment of epiphany when the paternity is eventually revealed. Hester’s husband, who has been presumed lost at sea, arrives in Boston just as she is forced to stand on a scaffold and face the condemnation of the townsfolk. He vows to find the father of Hester’s child, but decides to remain incognito in order to pursue his search in secret. He takes the name Chillingworth, and takes up work as a medicine man.

Following her release from prison, Hester settles with her daughter, Pearl, and earns a living with her needlework. Years pass. Pearl is a strange impish child, old beyond her years. She is fascinated by Hester’s scarlet letter. A discussion over Pearl’s care and moral well-being reintroduces the town’s clergyman, Arthur Dimmesdale. The Minister’s health is failing, and he is being cared for by Chillingworth, who slowly comes to suspect that the minister’s illness is the result of some unconfessed guilt. At some point this crystallises into the suspicion that Dimmesdale is Pearl’s father. Fearing her husband’s suspicions, and that he may reveal all or do his some harm, Hester meets the Minister in the forest. She tells him Chillingworth is her husband, and of his thirst for revenge. The forest setting for this scene is another potent and threatening symbol in the novel. After seven years of suffering and secrecy Hester and Arthur are reconciled, and realise they still love one another. She convinces Dimmesdale to leave America so they can start a new life together. Renewed by this plan, the minister returns to town, and shortly thereafter, just before the day appointed for their departure for Europe, he gives an inspirational sermon. Seemingly Inspired by the impact of this sermon Dimmesdale decides to publicly confess his sin. This seems to bring on a climax in his health, because no sooner does he do that that he dies in Hester’s arms. This melodramatic finale to the novel is followed by a short post-script which tells of Hester and Pearl’s later life.

The scarlet letter Hester wears is a potent symbol which changes its meaning through the course of the novel. Initially it is a brand of shame, but later, as Hester’s charitable woks in the community earn her peoples respect it is said “many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said it meant Able, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.” (161) At the climax of the novel, when Dimmesdale bears his breast to reveal, the reader is given what are in effect alternative endings to choose from. Either he has branded himself with a letter A, or a letter has been branded on him by the work of the devil. His words of confession are sufficiently ambiguous to allow of a further interpretation, rejected by the narrator but presented nonetheless and preferred by the Minister’s friends and supporters, is that “there was no mark whatsoever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant’s” (259).

The novel plays with lots of different contrasting ideas: purity and shame, town and forest, old and new England, men and women, settlers and natives, science and religion. Hawthorne is clearly interested in the impact that the settler communities of the 17th century have had on the America of his period, two hundred years later. He is surprisingly non-judgmental about Hester’s sin, which even in 19th century USA would still have been shockingly transgressive, particularly when committed with a clergyman. There is no suggestion that Hester is particularly culpable in the sin, that she seduced the otherwise morally upstanding Minister. There is however a subtle implication that Dimmesdale’s health degenerates because he has caught a sexually transmitted disease from Hester. His health fails slowly, over several years, and he becomes emaciated and pale. There is no known cure for his unnamed affliction.

‘The Scarlet Letter’ is an exceptionally complex, fascinating novel. It is decades before its time – I think it is best read as a very early symbolist novel, rather than a mystery or an historical romance, even though these readings are interesting in themselves. It is also a very brave novel, dealing as it does with issues of sex outside marriage, infidelity, and love. In fact it doesn’t just deal with love, it celebrates it:

“Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world”

It is sympathetic towards the fallen woman at the novel’s heart – it is the letter which is scarlet, not Hester. She is a strong, independent and sexual heroine, not a victim:

“Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!”

 

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, horror, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – 1886

Stevenson’s ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” is an under-appreciated masterpiece. It’s a breathlessly fast paced story where the protagonist, Dr Jekyll, is dead (sorry, spoilers) halfway through the very short novel, and yet Stevenson manages to sustain the excitement until the big ‘reveal’ at the end. We now know of course that Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde, but it is still possible to imagine the excitement readers must have experienced on first finding this out, perhaps having worked it out for themselves a few pages earlier.

The novel uses a traditional framing device and a combination of diaries and other documents to provide some distance from the main action. Gabriel Utterson, a lawyer, is told by his cousin about an encounter some months ago, when he witnessed a sinister figure named Edward Hyde and a young girl accidentally bump into one another. Hyde trampled on the girl causing her some undefined harm. In a form of mob justice, Hyde was forced to pay £100 to avoid any scandal. He paid this on the spot fine with a cheque drawn on the account of Dr. Henry Jekyll, an old friend of Utterson. This tale reinforces Utterson’s fear that Jekyll is being blackmailed by Hyde – he has recently drawn his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary in case of his death or disappearance. Jekyll assures Utterson that there is nothing to worry about. Is there a suggestion that the reason Jekyll tolerates and funds Hyde is due to an ‘unnatural’ sexual relationship between the pair? This would explain the need to pay off witnesses to avoid a scandal, and also fits with the unspecified sins or vices that Jekyll admits to later in the novel when explaining his experiments.

Later, Hyde is implicated when a servant sees him beat a man to death with a heavy cane. Police find half of the cane, which is revealed to be one which Utterson himself gave to Jekyll. There is no trace of Hyde, and for a while Jekyll reverts to his former friendly manner. This cannot last, and soon Jekyll starts refusing to see any visitors. Then a mutual acquaintance of Jekyll and Utterson, Dr Lanyon, dies suddenly of shock. Before his death, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions that he should only open it after Jekyll’s death or his disappearance. It soon seems as if that time has come, because in the next chapter Jekyll’s butler, Poole, visits Utterson and explains that Jekyll has locked himself away in his laboratory for several weeks. They break into the laboratory to find the body of Hyde wearing Jekyll’s clothes and apparently dead from suicide.

They also find a letter from Jekyll to Utterson promising to explain the entire mystery. The suicide note and accompanying documents reveal that Lanyon’s death resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drinking a serum and, as a result of doing so, turning into Dr. Jekyll. The second letter explains that Jekyll, having previously indulged unstated vices found a way to transform himself and thereby indulge his vices without fear of detection. Unable to control the transformations he resolved to cease becoming Hyde, but it is too late – he is ever more helpless and trapped as the transformations increase in frequency and necessitate ever larger doses of the draught to reverse them. Eventually, one of the chemicals from which he had prepared the draught ran low. His ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll slowly vanished in consequence. He finally realises that he will soon become Hyde permanently.

I class Jekyll and Hyde, along with Dracula and Frankenstein, as the one of the three great horror novels of the 19th century. I appreciate that places me in the mainstream of critical reaction, but for some reason while the latter two works have been recognised as great works of fiction in their own rights, divorced from the industry of ‘inspired by’ films, television adaptation and novels they have generated, Jekyll and Hyde remains largely unread. Which is a pity, because it is genuinely scary. Hyde is a monster largely because he is so un-monstrous. The potion which Dr Jekyll discovers allows him to physically separate the good and evil parts of himself, but the Mr Hyde which emerges feels at first to be something quite positive. Outwardly he appears to be a normal man, although anyone seeing him is struck by his profoundly evil character:

“The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul.”

But this younger, lighter, happier personality comes with a catch:

“I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.” 

What I find fascinating about this novel is the way Stevenson brings together in one short story many of the prevailing big themes of the day: that science can unlock dangerous secrets, that people have dual or multiple personalities, and that some of our instincts are animalistic:

Jekyll experiments with splitting himself because he wants to find a way to indulge his appetite for vice with impunity. He releases a beast he cannot control:

“I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”

These vices are not specified, but sexually transmitted diseases, and their debilitating effect on men’s health, were a particular dread of the time. More specifically, the novel lends itself very conveniently to an allegorical reading of the need for homosexual men to live double lives. The Guardian noted in a review of a stage production a few years ago that:

“Even though Stevenson may not have intended leaving them, there are suggestive markers throughout the text: the suspected blackmail of Jekyll by his “young man”, his “favourite”; the “very pretty manner of politeness of Sir Danvers Carew” when approached in the street – terms that may have denoted forbidden liaisons to a Victorian readership. The hidden door by which he enters Jekyll’s house is the “back way”, even “the back passage”. It happens that the year of composition, 1885, was the year in which an amendment to an act of parliament made homosexual acts between men a criminal offence.”

Victorian society was still coming to terms with Darwin’s revolutionary idea that men had evolved from animals, and that it was from these origins that some of our animalist instincts could be traced. At the same time ideas around the subconscious were becoming more current, although yet to be formulated clearly by Freud in the twentieth century. Stevenson’s formulation of these ideas in ‘Dr Jekyll’ is arguably one of the earliest description of the divided consciousness:

“It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”

This is a fascinating, chilling and hugely influential book, horror for grown-ups, Stevenson’s best writing for adults.

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