Monthly Archives: May 2016

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

The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, 1962

The Golden Notebook is a complex narrative. The writer, Anna Wulf, uses four notebooks to record different aspects of her life, and at the end of the novel attempts to unite them in a fifth, gold-coloured, notebook. The novel waves together several parallel narratives, and at times it can be hard to work out whether we are reading Anna’s personal account of her life, or her fictionalised version. In addition to the ‘realistic’ narrative of Anna’s life – Free Women— the four notebooks – black for her adventures in Africa before World War 2,  red for her time as a on/off member of the British Communist Party, yellow for a fictionalised account of her relationships, which sometimes run ahead of the real life telling of her story, and at others behind, and blue for her personal journal of memories and dreams.TGN

The non-linear narrative Lessing uses was ground breaking for its time – there is little in the way of conventional story telling. When the novel was first published the focus in many critical responses was on Lessing’s frankness in sexual matters, and what were seen at the time as her feminist characters. 50 years and more on, the presentation of sexual relationships in the novel seems dated – perhaps inevitably. As a feminist character Anna in particular is utterly defined by her relationships with men – and while she is sexually liberated, her emphasis on being sexually available to men who pay her very little regard shows her vulnerability. In the final section of the novel, the apparently unifying golden notebook, where the tale of her relationship with Saul Green is fictionalised, virtually every encounter with Green, however strained or disagreeable, almost always ends with the throwaway line “and then we made love”.

In a Guardian piece written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, Margaret Drabble put this point more clearly:

“As a feminist and a free woman, living a life of what was then striking promiscuity, her protagonist Anna Wulf displays some curiously traditional female behaviour, which is even more puzzling on rereading. On one page she can declare, shockingly but truthfully, that “every woman believes in her heart that if a man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency.” But this same woman (albeit writing in a different notebook, about a later period in her life) is discovered preparing a meal for the man she loves and knows she is about to lose. Much care is lavished on this memorable set piece describing a breaded veal escalope with mushroom in sour cream, a dish that the defaulting man never turns up to eat. Throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing. …. And yet it seemed liberating at the time.”

The novel has a number of other dominant themes: the Cold War and the decline of the British Communist Party, the end of Empire, and not least the personal breakdown of the central character. Often the novel seemed increasingly self-referential – so for example the novel’s opening lines are “The two women were alone in the London flat”; much later, to help relieve her writer’s block, Anna is given an opening line for her novel, which of course is “The two women…” etc. Novels which have as their central character novelists are always going to go down this road.

To be frank I found ‘The Golden Notebook’ very hard work. It is very long, very repetitive (to read about a dull relationship is one thing – to read about it twice, once in the central character’s diarised version, and then again in her fictionalised, slightly changed but essentially the same, version – is quite another. I doubt I would have troubled to finish were it not for a reluctance to admit doing so in this blog, which I think says it all. Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, 45 years after ‘The Golden Notebook’ was published – 45 years in which Lessing published a great deal, but was never to repeat the critical or commercial success of her earlier work. It looks a little like a lifetime achievement award, which is understandable, but doesn’t make this novel any easier to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, 1719

Robinson Crusoe – or, as its amazing sub-title would have it ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates’ is quite an extraordinary book. Published in 1719 at the very dawn of the novel, it was widely taken as a true story. It was wildly popular, running through four editions in its first year of publication, and according to Wikipedia, by the end of the 19th century no book in the history of Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations (even into languages such as Inuktitut, Coptic and Maltese), with more than 700 such alternative versions.

When you read a classic like this you hope you are going to discover something beyond the popular culture version you have absorbed since your childhood. Some of the novels I have read recently were slightly disappointing in that regard – ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland‘ for example was everything I had been led to expect. ‘Dracula‘ and ‘Frankenstein‘ were probably the most remote or adrift from their origins. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was in many ways very familiar, but there were some things I hadn’t expected to find. For example I had no idea that Defoe wrote a sequel, ‘The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ which I must look out/download. Because I really enjoyed this novel.

Taking the novel as an adventure story for a minute and ignoring its importance as a cultural artefact, this was fun. After running away to sea, being enslaved and then escaping, Crusoe finally makes his way to Brazil, where he settles down and becomes prosperous. Greed tempts him into a voyage, where he is shipwrecked on the aforementioned deserted island. What isn’t well known is that his voyage was to purchase slaves to work on his plantation. The attitude to slavery is interestingly frank – slavery isn’t particularly nice for the slaves, Crusoe recognises – he knows even the cannibals he meets on ‘his’ island are still people – but then Christmas isn’t nice for turkeys. It’s just a fact of the world he lives in, and the thought of doing something about it doesn’t cross his mind, in the same way as we see suffering and misery in our own world and shrug and walk on by.  

‘Crusoe‘ can really only be read as a story of imperialism or colonialism. He goes about mastering his environment with a dogged determination, farming, building and learning skills such as pottery and basket weaving. The animals on the island are culled in a casual a way that helps the reader understand how 17th and 18th century sailors destroyed native populations of animals such as the dodo so wantonly. He slowly comes to a religious settlement with his situation, accepting that while God may have shipwrecked him alone on the island for decades, he also provided him with an Eden-like environment in which surviving is not a struggle.

“These reflections made me very sensible of the goodness of Providence to me, and very thankful for my present condition, with all its hardships and misfortunes ; and this part also I cannot but recommend to the reflection of those who are apt, in their misery, to say, Is any affliction like mine? Let them consider how much worse the cases of some people are, and their case might have been, if Providence had thought fit.”

Provisioned from the wreck of his ship with virtually every tool, seed, animal and material he could possibly need, he is able to construct a home, a farmstead, and a fortification against dangerous creatures (of which there are none) and savages, which only appear towards the end of the novel. This is inspired by the famous and mysterious ‘footprint on the sand’ scene, mysterious because Defoe stresses several times that there is only the one footprint. Where it comes from is never resolved, but leads Crusoe to discover the cannibals that periodically visit the other side of his island for their celebration feasts. He interrupts one such party to rescue his man Friday, who becomes a faithful friend. He teaches Friday all about Christianity. This generates one wonderful scene where Friday innocently asks Crusoe some difficult theological questions (specifically, If God is all powerful, why is his struggle with the Devil so protracted?) which lead to a bit of a tumbleweed moment – Crusoe has to evade the question by pretending not to hear it!

Having been quite slow paced while Crusoe explores his world and steadily turns it into a little England, the narrative accelerates when the cannibals arrive, swiftly followed by an English ship captured by mutineers and recaptured by Crusoe, on which he returns to England to reclaim his birthright and possessions. There is time for one last chase through the woods pursued by packs of wolves, before Defoe decides to let Crusoe rest and take a breather.

The impact of Defoe on the English novel was huge. Poe obviously borrows heavily from him in ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket’, as do the later Victorian adventure novelists such as Verne and Wells. You can even see traces of Crusoe in ‘Coral Island‘, and its counterpart ‘Lord of the Flies‘. This is the earliest novel I have reviewed to date, and its surprising modernity – there was no difficulty in language or style – is a tribute to Defoe’s innovation.

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Book review

Comment: Sudden death

Why do so many novels, classic or otherwise, end with the sudden death of a main character? Is it just laziness? Or are there really only a limited number of plot lines out there, so authors have to choose ‘sudden death’, ‘happily ever after’ or ‘to be continued’?reaper

You may think I am exaggerating, so I thought I’d complete a quick survey. Let’s look at the last 20 books I have reviewed, and see which end in the sudden and possibly unexplained death of a major character. It goes without saying that this selection will contain some serious spoilers, but if you have read my blog before, or the warning at the top of the home page, you will know I have a cavalier attitude towards that issue at the best of times. I genuinely don’t know how this is going to turn out, although if course if nobody dies I might reconsider publishing this…..

  1. Wuthering Heights. Virtually everybody dies, including all the main characters. Heathcliff drops dead at the end of the novel from no obvious cause, but with an unpleasant smile on his face.
  2. Underworld. Hard to argue there are any major characters, but those that we come across seem to make it through.
  3. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – definitely a ‘reader I married him’ ending.
  4. Voss. Almost everyone dies on Voss’s expedition into the Australian outback.
  5. Sybil ends with the death of several major characters in a rushed ending that suggests the author had something more important to do.
  6. Mrs Dalloway. A death plays a central part in the novel, but it is not of a major character, and doesn’t come at the end, so I don’t think I can count this one.
  7. Hadrian VII.. Hadrian is assassinated at the end of the novel.
  8. Tropic of Cancer. In keeping the novel’s breaking of conventions, Miller doesn’t provide any particular resolution at the end of Tropic of Cancer, let alone a death.
  9. Song of Solomon ends with Milkman’s leap of faith – whether it ends with his death or him learning how to fly, we aren’t told. I’m claiming this as a half!
  10. Beloved has an inconclusive ending, but no major deaths.
  11. To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m also calling this one a half – the novel ends with a death, but the character cannot be called major.
  12. The Way We Live Now. If ever there was a novel where the random death of the main character signals the author’s increasing boredom with his work, it is the utterly implausible suicide at the end of Trollope’s novel.
  13. The Rainbow. As you would expect with an inter-generational novel, there are some deaths, but they are not used as a plot ending device, so can’t count this one.
  14. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises – just to prove this exercise isn’t rigged, no sudden deaths at the end for the named characters.
  15. Amongst Women ends with the passing of the Moran family patriarch.
  16. Lolly Willowes. An unusual ending, but no deaths.
  17. Rabbit Redux – Rabbit has further to run at the end of Redux, but his dysfunctional girlfriend dies in a house fire, so I am claiming this one.
  18. The Heat of the Day ends with the ‘was it suicide or was it an accident’ death of the protagonist, Robert Kelway.
  19. Gulliver’s Travels – ending with the promise (fulfilled) of a sequel.
  20. The Scarlet Letter ends with the expiration of Hester’s mystery partner, Reverend Dimmesdale.

Depending on how generous you are with the halves, I think that makes over 50% of this random list of classic novels ending with sudden deaths. In some cases the death is a natural conclusion to a story arc – in others (Sybil, The Way We Live Now) the deaths are hurried and unlikely, and used simply as a convenient way to draw the novel to a close. It seems as if a sudden death brings a finality that authors find hard to resist.

 

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 19th Century literature, Book review, Bronte

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, 1847

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‘Wuthering Heights’ has over 22,000 reviews on Goodreads alone; one has to wonder what else I could possibly add to that overwhelming weight of opinion and consideration?

The dark and gothic tale is constructed with a complex variety of framing structures – at one point the narrative is told by Mr Lockwood, the tenant of Thrushcross Grange, recounting the story told him by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper of the Grange and the Heights, who in turn recounts details of a message from Isabella Heathcliff (nee Linton). People drop dead with alarming frequency, and nurture dark passions to the grave and beyond. The novel opens in 1801 with Lockwood’s neighbourly visit to the Heights, and the story is then told in a series of flashbacks/reprises. This means we have a clear picture of how things are going to end – until the final closing chapters, at least.

Continue reading →
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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Don Delillo, Underworld

Underworld, by Don Delillo, 1997

Some novels are easy reads – the pages roll past in a blur, the events have a pace and unity that keep you turning the page, but the reader sometimes feel a bit of a passenger, riding the tide of the novel without having to do any work. Chapters are as short as the reader’s attention span, and when the novel is put down at night it can be picked up again at any time without the need to remind oneself where one left off. ‘Underworld’ is the precise opposite of that kind of novel. It is complex, dense, extremely long (832 pages), and peopled with a large cast of characters. The narrative voice is evasive, jumping from character to character and often it is not until well into a paragraph that there is any clue as to who the “I” is – and the very next paragraph it could change once again. The Underworldlanguage Delillo uses is fractured and often very poetic; his characters usually speak in incomplete sentences and there is often no indication who is speaking. The time structure of the novel is equally fragmented and the jumps in time are mirrored by jumps around the globe. This all adds up to a challenging novel, from many different aspects – but the question is, was it worth it? Continue reading →

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Book review

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos, 1925

‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ was published in the same year as ‘The Great Gatsby’, and provides an interesting contrast to that dazzling portrait of prohibition era America. ‘Laugh-out loud’ is an over-used expression but I genuinely (and slightly against my better judgment) found myself laughing out loud at this delightfully silly novel, which in diary form tells the story of Lorelei Lee’s uninhibited adventures in 1920’s New York and Europe. Continue reading →

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Book review

Voss, by Patrick White, 1957

Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 “for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature” (I think what this is saying is that White was the first great writer about rather than from Australia). Of ‘Voss’, the citation said it is “an intensive character study against the background of the fascinating Australian wilds”. Faint praise, don’t you think?Voss

Briefly, ‘Voss’ tells the story of Continue reading →

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 19th Century literature, Book review

Sybil, by Benjamin Disraeli, 1845

“Would he have made the cut if he had not become prime minister?”

asks Robert McCrum in his Guardian article explaining why he chose ‘Sybil’ for his “top 100 novels written in English” list. He goes on:

”his literary contemporaries such as Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and even Anthony Trollope are much greater novelists. Disraeli’s plots are far-fetched, and his characters balsa-wood. At the same time, he has flashes of brilliance that equal these greats at their best.”

This is where McCrum and I part company. I found no flashes of brilliance in ‘Sybil’ (and I did look carefully) and I don’t think anyone else would either. McCrum provides no quotes to support his contention, and if you look at this selection in Wikiquote I don’t think you will find anything there which justifies this description either. The weight of evidence to demonstrate the opposite, the wooden, flat, simply bad nature of Disraeli’s prose is overwhelming. I obviously can’t flood this review out with bad prose, but here are a couple of examples, from the 400 pages of possibilities:   Continue reading →

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

Supplementary: Hadrian 7th – F Rolfe – 1904 (Part 2)

Fans of obscure words might be interested in this.

In my review of F Rolfe’s Hadrian 7th (1904) I mentioned Rolfe’s predilection for using arcane language. I made a note of just a small selection as examples – see if you recognise any:

  • koprolalian
  • cardinalitial
  • matutinal
  • acolyth
  • prooimion
  • Sbdiaconate
  • yearnest
  • exoletes
  • dicaculous
  • dilacerated
  • pachydermatosity
  • juvence
  • exsequies
  • intagliate
  • curule
  • rascalt
  • fulguration

How did you do? Obviously this exercise is made more difficult by the absence of context, and in any novel about the papacy you would expect a few obscure terms about the Roman Catholic liturgy and rituals. But Rolfe goes completely overboard, rooting out obscure 16th century terms, often adapting them into a form not normally found (so koprolalian would normally be rendered with a c not a k, meaning the obsessive use of scatological language). Others he more simply invents from their Latin and Greek roots – prooimion for example, with which he opens his novel.

The message is clear – Rolfe is more intelligent than the reader, whom he holds in contempt. If my earlier review hadn’t made the point clearly enough, unless you love weird obscure words – DON’T READ IT!! I do so you don’t have to.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925

 

‘Mrs Dalloway’ is Woolf’s modernist masterpiece. Sadly, anything I have to say about it, as is so often the case when reviewing classics, is not now going to be original. If you want to know what happens in the novel Wikipedia is a click away, and the novel’s themes, language, characterisation and structures have been analysed to death over the years. Yet the purpose of this blog is not to break new ground in the field of literary analysis, (or even avoid tired clichés such as “break new ground”), but to record my honest impression of the novel, and leave me sufficient reminders that I did actually read it, once a few years have passed.Mrs Dalloway

‘Mrs Dalloway’ follows Clarissa, the eponymous central character in a single summer’s day as she prepares for a party at her house in Westminster. It is set shortly after the end of the First World War, and the echoes of the war in people’s lives reverberate in the same way that Big Ben echoes throughout the course of the day/novel. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ is daring in its form – it draws a portrait rather than tells a story, and takes point of view narration to places it had not gone before. I have avoided using the term “stream of consciousness” thus far, but no further – but in fact that doesn’t tell the whole story, because as well as showing us the thoughts of her characters in a free form manner, the novel swoops freely from one mind to another as characters pass in the street. Woolf also uses another technique to unsettle the reader, leaving the object of sentences to the last possible moment in many of her sentences. This requires the reader to restart many sentences, once they have ascertained who is thinking or speaking.

The novel is daring in other ways. It introduces homosexual relationships in a coded way – but fairly explicitly nonetheless. It is clear that Clarissa had feelings for a female childhood friend, and fears that her daughter has come under the spell of a very serious lesbian acquaintance. Clarissa’s parallel character, Septimus Warren, avoids sex with his wife, which he finds disgusting, and is unable to come to terms with the loss of his close army friend, Evans.

I’ve described ‘Mrs Dalloway’ earlier as a masterpiece, and I wanted to try to illustrate this, not just with a short summary but a closer look at the novel’s opening paragraph. Here it is:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it? —“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it?

So why is this such exceptional writing? I wanted to pick out a few features. First of all the reader is only given clues as to who the characters are – we can guess that Lucy is a domestic servant – because Mrs Dalloway is doing a chore for her because she is so busy – and that Mr Rumplemayer is a tradesman, because his men are coming to remove the doors from their hinges. But this is very little to go on – and we have no clue (at this point) as to where Boulton is (a childhood country home, we can infer, but not where) or who Peter Walsh is – a family friend or member, past lover. The fact that he is given a full name, unlike Lucy or Mr Rumplemayer, tells us something about his relationship with Clarissa, but so far we know very little about her – she is prosperous enough to own a house where the doors need to be removed to accommodate a party, and has domestic staff, but that is just about it. This is clearly going to be a novel where the reader has to do a lot of work to understand what is going on, who is speaking, what their relationships are to one another, and so on.

This opening paragraph introduces us to Clarissa’s internal monologue, and several of her ways of thinking. This isn’t simply a replay of her thoughts – there is still a narrator here (not the direct reporting of thought as speech, “yes, I said yes, I will yes” but “it had always seemed to her” (rather than “it had always seemed to me”). The narrator is not a translator, simply leaving the reader small clues to follow. Her memories are very visual and sensual – she remembers the squeaking hinges on the French windows – but what starts as a very happy childhood memory – “what a lark, what a plunge” gradually becomes more serious. Look at the adjectives – “fresh” “calm” “stiller”, “chill”, “sharp” and “solemn” – all leading to the feeling “that something awful was about to happen”. She cannot avoid the darkness of her thoughts for long, and even something as pleasant as a summer’s morning leads her inexorably to a darker place. The reader is here introduced to the dark element Clarissa’s character which she will struggle unsuccessfully throughout the novel to escape from.

Clarissa also thinks in metaphor – the morning is fresh “as if issued to children on a beach” and the air is “like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave”. Another theme which is introduced here is the fallibility of memory “Was that it?” is repeated as a refrain.

Just one final thought on sentence structure. Stream of consciousness writing is sometimes thought of as inevitably leading to long cumbersome sentences. You can find these here if you look for them, of course, but there are also incomplete and fractured much shorter sentences – “For Lucy had her work cut out for her” – which accurately reflects the way thoughts will come to us, sometimes in long streams, and at others in short staccato bursts.

I hope I have written enough here to whet your appetite for some Woolf. I know she is not to everyone’s taste – but there are depths here that you could take many readings to explore, extraordinarily thoughtful and sensitive writing that are a pleasure to revisit.

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