Monthly Archives: May 2021

Book review

Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel, 2012

There are certain authors I feel a sense of guilt about not admiring. Coetzee is the obvious example – everyone tells me Disgrace is a masterpiece, but it left me cold. Hilary Mantel’s novels fall into the same category – even as I was reading Bring up the Bodies I could feel the pressure to enjoy the craftsmanship and characterisation, to marvel at the wealth of detail, and to ignore some of the problematic issues (which of course I am not going to do.)

Bring up the Bodies is the second novel in Mantel’s series about the life of Thomas Cromwell, a sequel to Wolf Hall. It recounts the dramatic events running up the end of Henry the Eighth’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. It imaginatively recreates these events from Cromwell’s Machiavellian perspective, using his inner monologue as the narrative voice. The novel is prefaced by five pages of characters and several family trees, which I referred to throughout the novel (‘Which one is he?’). This should give you some idea of the complexity of the narrative. I certainly know more now about the history of this period than I did previously!

I confess I did not know what happened to Cromwell after he engineered the end of Henry’s second marriage – but I was sure that it did not work out well (spoiler – it does not). I think we are intended to see he, Cromwell as a master manipulator, someone pulling all the strings, carefully orchestrating the downfall of the Boleyns, serving the interest of the king but at the same time ensuring his own position is secured. But actually he is not in control of events in any sense. Henry is volatile and dangerous. While Cromwell is on the right side of the king he prospers, but it is clearly only a matter of time before he falls out with him and is used as a scapegoat for all the king’s crimes and misdemeanours. He’s simply too convenient an excuse – ‘Cromwell made me do it’ – not to be used sooner or later, not to mention the fact that his money and his offices of state could then be redeployed around the court for more influence and favour. As he becomes more powerful at court, he accrues more enemies, and comes closer to the day of his eventual demise. He is a threatening figure at Court, and dangerous people are likely to be brought down sooner or later. No-one can be more powerful than the king. As Call-me Wriothesley puts it:

“If this is what Cromwell does to the cardinal’s lesser enemies, what will he do by and by to the king himself?”

Henry is dangerous and ruthless, and there is no way this is going to end well for Cromwell. He seems to sense this himself – it’s hardly the most profound of insights:

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”

There is a lot we do not know about the end of Anne and Henry’s marriage. At its most basic, we do not know if she was guilty as charged. She was charged with and convicted of adultery with a number of other men, including George Boleyn, her brother. It seems highly unlikely that she would have risked her life for – what? The chance of another pregnancy, or simply because Henry was an inadequate lover? For perfectly understandable reasons Mantel does not try to answer this – she leaves it ambiguous as to whether Boleyn was guilty or not. The obvious answer – that Henry was bored with Anne and didn’t want to go through another protracted divorce, so turned to Cromwell to fix the problem – is avoided, I suspect simply because it is not that interesting an answer. Instead the solution presented to the reader is that this outcome is the result of Cromwell’s deviousness.

At the heart of the novel is his investigation into this allegation. As part of his enquiry he, Cromwell, invites one of the suspects, Mark Smeaton, to supper. Mark is a Flemish lute-player, the most junior of the suspects, and a member of the queen’s court. Court gossip has implicated him as one of the queen’s lover. Here he jokes with him (he, Cromwell) and in the course of the conversation Smeaton confesses to sleeping with the Queen. Smeaton must have been profoundly stupid to think he could boast of cuckolding the King, a man not known for his patience or understanding, to a senior minister with a fearsome reputation for being the King’s enforcer, and that there would be no consequences. The traditional or conventional explanation of Smeaton’s confession is that he was brutally tortured, but that would make Cromwell seem more of a brute and less of a manipulator, able to coax a damning confession out of a man using flattery and suggestion.

The passage where Smeaton confesses is key to the novel’s denouement. For Cromwell this is an interrogation; Smeaton thinks it is an informal chat, a delusion Cromwell fosters:

(Cromwell to Smeaton): “I ask your charity… I come to you because you are close to the queen, and the other gentlemen will not help me.

(This is of course flattery. Cromwell gives Smeaton the title of ‘gentleman’ even though he is a commoner, and appeals to his sense of importance as someone close to the queen.)

I have the power to reward you, and will make sure you have everything you deserve, if only you can give me some window into the queen’s desires.

(Cromwell makes it clear he is the one in control of the conversation (I have the power), but hints he wants to reward Smeaton rather than punish him. Smeaton should have noticed the reference to him having what he deserves rather than desires. The next reference to the queen’s desires introduces the idea of her as someone with bodily appetites).

I need to know why she is unhappy, and what I can do to remedy it. For it is unlikely she will conceive an heir while her mind is unquiet. And if she could do that: ah, then all our tears would be dried.’

Mark looks up. ‘Why, it is no wonder she is unhappy’, he says. ‘She is in love’.

‘With whom?’

‘With me.’

He, Cromwell, leans forward, elbows on the table: then puts a hand up to cover his face. (To disguise his reaction)

‘You are amazed’ Mark suggests.

That is only part of what he feels. I thought, he says to himself, that this would be difficult. But it is like picking flowers.” (273/274)

There’s no question this is subtly done – Cromwell flatters the young man and gives him a false sense of security. He implies he is acting in the queen’s best interests, and that if he is able to help he will get everything he ‘deserves’, a dangerous ambiguity. Later Cromwell encourages Smeaton to be more explicit about his relationship with the queen by suggesting he thought he was a ‘sodomite’.

But despite all this, it still beggars belief that Smeaton would confess so casually and freely. This is not a bar-room boast, but a conversation with the King’s most senior and most dangerous advisor. Smeaton is aware that Cromwell is not his ally, and realises his mistake, but far too late, and he is placed under arrest. From this point the whole case against the queen and the others accused is constructed, and leads quickly to their conviction and execution. In the moment this account is a plausible explanation for the known historical events, but when one takes a step back and considers the conversation in context it seems highly unlikely that Smeaton would have blurted his confession out with nothing more than flattery to persuade him to cooperate.

That is one example, but the rest of the historical interpretation of the novel is often equally hard to swallow. The popular myth that the queen had six fingers on one hand and was therefore condemned at trial as a witch is demonstrably untrue, (none of her contemporaries mention any such feature, nor do any of the paintings of her show it – it’s not something that would have been easy to hide!) but instead of treating it with the contempt it deserves Mantel nods to the idea, suggesting that the myth may have had its origins in the belief that Boleyn had in some way enchanted the king.

ButB is an easier read than Wolf Hall. The irritating over-use of the personal male pronoun is not dropped, but Mantel clarifies who the ‘he’ is where it is ambiguous by persistently inserting the phrase ‘he, Cromwell’. I would rather she did this than spending half the novel wondering what is going on/who is speaking, but as a device it seemed clumsy given how flexible English is in telling us who is doing what.

I would never say never, but I doubt I am going to read The Mirror and the Light, the third in the trilogy, any time soon. For one thing it is around 800 pages long, and I know how it ends! I appreciate that sounds infantile, but with so many books and so little time this is all about choices. Historical novels always have to address the fact that the outcome of the novel is known. There’s no suspense about how it ends. Mantel deals with this by imaginatively showing us events through the eyes of a character who previously has not been given a central role in earlier histories, and by speculating on details of the key turning points in these tumultuous and dangerous times. Cromwell always remains just out of reach, never the hero, never entirely sympathetic. His cold-bloodedness is excused, even justified, but is harm to stomach at times.

Struggling to put my finger on the source of my mild dissatisfaction with this novel, I thought back to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. Set only a few decades later, this historical novel aims to do much of what Mantel aspires to with Bring up the Bodies – to bring to light some historical events through the eyes of a character who previously has not been a focus of analysis compared to the major protagonists, and to speculate about some of the questions that have puzzled historians for so long. Both authors bring to life their narrators and imaginatively recreate what living at this time must have been like. Perhaps O’Farrell simply chose a more sympathetic narrator, but Hamnet has a vitality and authenticity that BuTB does not. I can’t be sure but I suspect it all comes down to the fact that I found the lives of Warwickshire working people more interesting than Tudor court intrigue, however much more ostensibly dramatic and historically significant the latter may have been.

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Book review

Youth by J M Coetzee, 2002

Youth opens with the narrator John studying at the University of Cape Town in the early 1960’s. He lives a solitary life having rejected his parents and finds it hard to make friends. He dreams of one day becoming a poet, and has strong opinions about other contemporary writers:

“As for his own writing, he would hope to leave behind, were he to die tomorrow, a handful of poems that, edited by some selfless scholar and privately printed in neat little duodecimo pamphlet, would make people shake their heads and murmur beneath their breath ‘Such promise! Such a waste’.”

Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II - Wikipedia

He moves to London in search of a job and a girlfriend. Finding work in 1960s England was obviously very easy because he is inundated with offers, and accepts a role programming computers for IBM. He feels this mundane work is beneath him, and outside the office spends his time seeking out a partner and a life of culture. Eventually he resigns this role trying to focus on his writing. Unable to avoid the need to earn a living, reluctantly he ungraciously accepts another computing job, this time working for International Computers in the suburbs. The text closes with the narrator having made little progress in his search for fulfilment.

Is this a novel or a memoir? I am not sure. The publisher offers few clues. The text is written in the third person, but the events closely track those of Coetzee’s own life suggesting a semi-autobiographical format. The ambiguity is quite deliberate of course – it is left to the reader to decide how to respond. As a novel Youth fails on almost all counts – the central character is a boring prig, obnoxious towards the women in his life, snobbish towards almost everyone he meets, and a terrible poet. There’s little incident or narrative in the text, and the sense of time and place is weak. It rains a lot in London, and Londoners are suspicious of foreigners. That’s the level of insight. The narrator is strangely, unrealistically successful in seducing young women, but avoids any kind of intimacy beyond the physical. He’s a horrible person and spending time in his company wasn’t fun.

As a memoir it is on the other hand brutally honest. Few people would portray themselves so unblinkingly as such an unpleasant, shallow, snobbish bore. The New York Times review of Youth nailed it when it said that it ” covers that period of a man’s life when he’s most repulsive both to himself and others.” Hermione Lee in the London Review of Books concluded that “Youth is the ultimately alienated and alienating autobiography: not an inward exploration, or an ethical indictment of the author/subject, but a self-parody.” That may be taking it too far – I had the impression that Coetzee simply wanted to be honest about this period of his life and decided not to spare the awful details. Which is fine as an exercise in exorcism, but it didn’t make the novel/memoir any easier or interesting to read. Coetzee is a better novelist than a biographer – perhaps it would be better to leave this role to someone with more objectivity than the author himself?

Youth by J. M. Coetzee (Paperback, 2003) - shop4jp.com

The choice of cover illustration is interesting – a sparsely populated Trafalgar Square at dusk, shrouded in mist. The paperback edition uses the same location but it’s pouring with rain, just in case anyone missed the point that the weather in the UK isn’t up to South African standards! On the one hand this is textually an inappropriate setting to choose – the narrator makes it clear he has avoided all tourist traps such as this. At the same time Nelson’s Column is obviously an instantly and easily recognisable landmark. I wonder whether there isn’t a subtle hint that the author/narrator aspires to a similar iconic status? I suppose with two Booker Prizes and a Nobel under his belt he could claim he is well on the way?

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Book review

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson, 2012

Once again I am coming late to this novel but applying the ‘read it/review it’ rule, here we are. If ever there was a book to which the cliché “if this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this” applied, then this is it. The Hundred Year Old Man was something of a publishing sensation in the previous decade and hung around on best-seller lists forever, spawning a sequel and inevitable film adaptations.

The rest of the novel follows in this vein – Karlsson goes on the run, accumulating accomplices as he goes, each instalment more farcical than the last. Interleaved with each chapter is the story of Karlsson’s extraordinary life. He was present at and played a part in almost all the main historical events of the twentieth century, along the way meeting Stalin, Churchill, Mao, Truman, and several other major political figures. Each encounter is played out along the same lines. Karlsson treats them as ordinary human beings, shares a drink or two with them, and emerges unscathed. Well, almost all – the meeting with Stalin is an exception:

The book’s title tells you all you need to know about the central premise. Allan Karlsson is one hundred years old. The director of the retirement home in where he lives small-town Sweden is planning a celebration for him, but rebellious Allan opts out – he, well, climbs out the window and disappears. Allan has marched to the beat of his own drum all his life, and is not planning to stop now. At the nearby bus station he meets a young man, who asks him to look after his suitcase while he goes to the toilet. Allan’s bus arrives and on a whim he takes the suitcase with him. Complications, as they say, ensue.

“I shall destroy capitalism! Do you hear! I shall destroy every single capitalist! And I shall start with you, you dog, if you don’t help us with the bomb!’
Allan noted that the had managed to be both a rat and a dog in the course of a minute or so. And that Stalin was being rather inconsistent, because now he wanted to use Allan’s services after all.
But Allan wasn’t going to sit there and listen to this abuse any longer. He had come to Moscow to help them out, not to be shouted at. Stalin would have to manage on his own.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Allan.
‘What,’ said Stalin angrily.
‘Why don’t you shave off that moustache?’
With that the dinner was over, because the interpreter fainted.”

The similarities with Forrest Gump are striking – Karlsson is a simple man who has no interest in politics or religion, and simply wants to know where the next drink is coming from. His simplicity is what allows him to endure five years in Stalin’s gulag and to go on to charm almost everyone he meets. I was also strongly reminded of Jaroslav Hašek’s wonderful 1920’s novel The Good Soldier Švejk in terms of Karlsson’s irrepressibility and simple good humour, although the Hasek novel is many times more subversive. The Hundred Year Old Man is simply a farce, with surprisingly little to say about the way we treat the old. or any other social issue.

It’s almost impossible to judge the quality of the translation, but I did have one quibble about it. One character Karlsson meets on his escapade, ‘The Beauty’ is, we are told, profoundly foul-mouthed. Yet for some reason in translation she speaks almost completely without curse words. Why these would have been edited out escapes me, unless people in the UK and Sweden have very different understandings of what foul-mouthed means!

Once the initial pattern of the novel was established, the repetition and predictability of the narrative became an issue for me. You know in the flashback chapters that Karlsson is going to escape from whatever scrape he finds himself in by some improbable stroke of good fortune, and in the present that he is going to evade the gang members chasing him for the stolen drug money that was in the suitcase, again by some improbable fluke. The interest lies in how this is going to happen rather than if, and the author is without doubt inventive in creating new ways for Karlsson to escape – in one episode for example a gang member is killed by being sat on by an elephant.

Overall I was disappointed with this novel. There was very little variation in tone, the characters were one-dimensional, and the plotting predictable. The premise is great, but the direction it took was derivative. Why this was so popular escapes me – what did you think?

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Book review

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 1975

Heat and Dust continues the early Booker fascination with post-colonial Britain. ‘Losing’ the Empire must have been more traumatic than we now realise looking back from the perspective of the twenty-first century: the novels of the time suggest that there was a lot of processing to be done to come to terms with the trauma involved. Was colonialism really such a damaging, dehumanising process for both the peoples being governed and the generations of British men and their families who served overseas?

Told in alternating chapters the book moves between the 1920s and the 1970s as the unnamed narrator recounts the scandalous history of her step-grandmother and her own parallel experiences in India either side of independence. In the 1920s thread of the novel, Olivia, a young and rather vacuous English bride, becomes bored with the narrow life of a imperial civil administrator’s wife, and seeks adventure in the company of the Nawab, a dangerously charming minor royal, described as “the worst type of ruler – the worst type of Indian – you can have“. Their relationship leads to a scandal that echoes down the decades to the narrator’s generation. She sets out to explore the places where the family secrets were first played out, armed with some papers and letters from Olivia to her sister Marcia, letters which are retold as the earlier part of the story. As she does so she shares some of Olivia’s experiences, and makes some of her own mistakes.

I must admit I made the rookie mistake of assuming that the author was from India due to her name. In fact Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was European, but married an Indian man and lived there for 25 years. Does that matter? Very much so as it happens. The novel’s entire point of view is that of the white settler. It concerns itself with the problems of living in a hot and dusty country when one is not used to the weather, the food, the religion or the customs. The focus is on the impact living in India has on the English men and women in the country, rather than the impact of being governed by Englishmen has on India and Indians:

“Although the Major was so sympathetic to India, his piece sounds like a warning. He said that one has to be very determined to withstand–to stand up to–India. And the most vulnerable, he said, are always those who love her best. There are many ways of loving India, many things to love her for…but all, said the Major, are dangerous for the European who allows himself to love too much. India always, he said, finds out the weak spot and presses on it. …Yes, concluded the Major, it is all very well to love and admire India–intellectually, aesthetically, he did not mention sexually but he must have been aware of that factor too–but always with a virile, measured, European feeling. One should never, he warned, allow oneself to become softened (like Indians) by an excess of feeling; because the moment that happens — the moment one exceeds one’s measure– one is in danger of being dragged over to the other side. … He who loved India so much, knew her so well, chose to spend the end of his days here! But she always remained for him an opponent, even sometimes an enemy, to be guarded and if necessary fought against from without and, especially, from within: from within one’s own being.”

Of course there are Indians in the novel, and they are given voices, but they are almost all secondary characters, and mostly remain enigmatic. The women in purdah in the Nawab’s palace are almost entirely voiceless. But the essential theme of the novel is the question of what it means to be a white colonialist woman in India, not what it means to be Indian. Jhabvala wrote several screenplays for the film directors Ivory and Merchant, who are notorious for their sanitised, romanticised portraits of colonial India, so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the picture we are shown here is of an India that is unthreatening, picturesque, at times almost quaint.

I suspect that the narrative technique of telling essentially the same story twice, once in the 1920s and again in the 1970s, is intended to invite the reader to consider what has changed. The narrator is unmarried, and her discrete affair with a local married man does not seem to cause the scandal it once had done. (I am not sure why English authors found sex between Indian men and English women so fascinating) But any connection between the Englishwomen and their Indian lovers remains unconvincing. There’s a suggestion of sexual tourism in the relationships. The end of empire allows the narrator to embrace India in a way Olivia was unable to – for example she sleeps outside at night because of the heat, which for Olivia would have been unthinkable.

‘I lie awake for hours: with happiness, actually.  I have never known such a sense of communion.  Lying like this under the open sky there is a feeling of being immersed in space – though not in empty space, for there are all these people sleeping all around me, the whole town and I am part of it. How different from my often very lonely room in London with only my own walls to look at and my books to read.’    

This is progress of sorts, but I don’t think we ever forget that the narrator character is living off savings (presumably) and will leave India as soon as she either gets bored or runs out of money (there’s no suggestion she ever considers getting a job).

Jhavbvala drops some heavy hints that the Nawab is bisexual. He certainly exerts a powerful influence over Harry, a young Englishman who forms part of the Nawab’s entourage. The Nawab treats Harry like a pet – “he is like a child that doesn’t know what it wants! We others have to decide everything for him’ . This and his involvement with the local dacoits makes the Nawab a sinister character. We are constantly reassured of his seductive charm but I was completely immune to it personally. Harry’s equivalent in the 1970s narrative is Chid, a young English man in search of enlightenment in India, who moves in with the narrator and

“needs sex very badly, and seems to take it for granted that I will give it to him the same way I give him my food. I have never had such a feeling of being used…I don’t know why I let him go ahead. I’m much bigger and stronger than he is and could easily keep him off…But he has constant erections and goes to a tremendous size”.

I genuinely have no idea if this image is more disturbing or hilarious.

When the Guardian revisited this novel as part of a review of the Booker prize winners it described it as

“the literary equivalent of Coldplay; securely pedestrian, slightly patronising, tinged with the exotic, referencing far better work, but ultimately dull and pointless. It is, in short, literature for people who hate literature.”

Harsh words, and not entirely fair. I am quick to judge novels that ignore the diversity of voices (see here for example) but for all its faults Heat and Dust was not a travelogue. It doesn’t romanticise India and attempts to describe the impacts of colonialism, even if the perspective remains solidly that of the colonial power. I have never seen the film adaptation of Heat and Dust, but instinctively it seems a better medium for capturing the scale and beauty of India compared to the restrictive pages of this novel.

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Book review

Last Orders, by Graham Swift, 1996

Last Orders, by Graham Swift, 1996

Four men take the ashes of a friend, Jack Dodds, to Margate, to scatter them off the end of the pier. Last Orders is the story of their journey. Along the way all four are given time to tell their stories as internal monologues and through their conversations, as are some of the women in their lives. It’s a strikingly simple story where little happens, but where we warm to the frailty and vulnerability of these flawed, human characters as we learn more about them.

Ray, the character who is given the most space to develop his narrative, works in an insurance office, but always wanted to be a jockey. His friends know him as Lucky; he is a very successful gambler. However the nickname was originally given to him during his years in the African desert during the Second World War, when luck was needed to survive. Together with his friends Lenny, a greengrocer, Vince, Jack’s adopted son, and Vic, a funeral director, they stop at various points along the way from Bermondsey to Margate as a way of saying farewell to their late friend. We learn that all the men served in the army, missed out on careers they would have preferred to have pursued, and troubled relationships, especially with their daughters who they have all in one way or another lost. All have secrets that will remain unspoken. Their shared experiences bond them together. Their pilgrimage, underlined by a brief stop in Canterbury, ends with them casting their friend’s ashes to the turbulent April winds.

I enjoyed Last Orders. Its structure meant I had to invest time in working out who was who, the various family relationships etc, but once those were clear the short chapters and the alternating perspectives meant the narrative had a lot of pace, despite the relative lack of incident. I did have one quibble with the text, which will take some time to describe but shouldn’t be given too much emphasis despite that. My concern was with the use of the vernacular. Each character ‘speaks’ – including in internal monologue – in a form of South London Cockney. There’s thankfully no real attempt to transcribe the accent – no dropped h’s and glottal stops – but Swift tries to catch the cadences and slang of working class Bermondsey.

The reviews quoted in the edition I read were full of praise for the success of this attempt and the authenticity of the language:

“He has succeeded in elevating the demotic to an elegiac level of which Wordsworth could only dream; here is language such as men do use” (This quote is cited as coming from The Guardian, although it is not to be found in the paper’s original review of the novel).

“The novel’s hero is the English language as spoken by ordinary people. ” Sunday Times.

And several others along similar lines. It’s ironic that the Guardian reviewer apparently used the awkward phrase “such as men do use” to describe authentic everyday speech. I’ve ranted here before about authenticity in novels – if an author is aiming to represent something as authentic then they need to get it right. When the Guardian revisited the novel in 2012 the reviewer shared my concern:

“I did have a problem though, right from the very first sentence, which reads: “It aint like your regular sort of day.” It’s a striking enough opening and, viewed retrospectively, a witty summary of the rest of the book, which takes place over the course of one fraught day. Yet, for me, that sentence didn’t ring true. Graham Swift grew up in south London, and presumably knows the local habits and speech patterns better than – say – Martin Amis knows Lionel Asbo’s. But there’s something that doesn’t quite click. His colloquialisms and slang and deliberately simplistic language all seem a bit cor-blimey-guvnor. I’ll be amazed if I ever read a novel with more “aints” per page. (I just turned to page 63, for instance, and found: “June aint my sister. I aint got no sister … I aint going to be a butcher never, it aint what I’m trying to be.”)

As John Mullan delicately put it: “In Last Orders, there is sometimes the danger of hearing the TV demotic of Only Fools and Horses or EastEnders.” Or as AN Wilson noted more bluntly in the same letter to the Independent quoted above: “The ersatz Bermondsey ‘characters’ had as much plausibility as Kipling’s Cockney rhymes. One began to imagine the embarrassment of reading this stuff to a real Bermondsey butcher.” This time, Wilson has a point. The novel’s voice is flawed.” 

“Graham Swift grew up in South London” – well yes and no. He was hardly a Bermondsey boy! He went to school at Dulwich College, a so-called ‘independent’ i.e. private school, and from there to Cambridge. Which of itself doesn’t mean he is unable to capture the way working class people speak, it just makes it harder. Generally speaking Swift carries this act of impersonation off quite well, but at times he tries too hard (“it aint never gone nowhere”) and at others Swift the author takes over the voice of the character in the course of their internal monologue, so they start speaking in elegant imagery – Ray at one point describes the aroma of the seaside at Margate as “It smells like memory itself, or the inside of a lobster pot”. To be fair, capturing the precise language and cadences of former soldiers from Bermondsey, with its very specific slang informed by the years in the desert, would have been incredibly difficult. I thought the flawed nature of the novel’s voice would be an issue for me, would possibly even spoil the novel, and I know I have made the point at some length, but once I tuned in to the language I came to terms with it and was able to pass over the moments when it all went a bit Eastenders.

The title of the novel is a play on the phrase “last orders”, called out by publicans just before closing, and the instructions given by Jack about the disposal of his ashes. In other words closing time in the pub comes to represent the end of life. This is not a new insight of course – Eliot used this image much earlier – ‘hurry up please it’s time’. But the theme of death pervades the novel, with the final journey to Margate to scatter Jack’s ashes allowing the characters time to reflect on their own mortality and lives. The narrative point of view shifts constantly although Ray’s is the dominant voice – when chapters are given place name headings his is the narrative voice.

“What might have been?” is a question we all ask ourselves as we get older. Jack dreamed of being a doctor; Ray a jockey. Amy, Jack’s wife, had an affair with Ray but never wavered in her devotion to June, her profoundly disabled daughter. (Incidentally I noticed that the 1996 Guardian review called June a ‘moron’. Such insensitive language would of course not be acceptable now. Things do change.) But they are bound by the expectations of their families and society. Vince, coming from the following generation, is able to break the bonds of family expectation – he refuses to follow his adoptive father into the butchery trade and sets up as an independent car salesman.

The second world war is another important theme in the novel. It is easy for us to forget in the twenty-first century that even in the 1990’s most old men would have served in the conflict in one way or another. The friendship between Jack and Ray started when they met in the North African desert, where Lenny served as well – he still half-jokingly refers to himself as “Gunner Tate.” Vic was in the navy, and while Vince is of the next generation he also spent five years in the army in Aden. The trip to Margate includes a stop for Vic to pay his respects at the Naval Monument at Chatham. The army shaped a whole generation of men, creating strong bonds between them, and this novel acknowledges the passing of that generation, another variation on the last orders theme

I try and avoid playing the ‘did the Booker jury get it right in (year)?’ game, because it’s fairly futile. Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace), Rohinton Mistry and the perennial Booker bridesmaid Beryl Bainbridge were all shortlisted the year Last Orders won, but I think it can hold its ground amongst that competition. It’s a finely crafted novel, slight on incident and plot development, as modern novels so often are, its structure is quite predictable, and I am not sure how long it will dwell in the memory (especially if I hadn’t written this post) but the characters were strong, believable and well-defined, and the mournful meditations on life, death and the road not taken weren’t overly depressing as they could have been. There was a five-minute kerfuffle about the novel’s debt to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying shortly after Last Orders was first published. While my instinct is to ignore such nonsense I mention it only because the much more powerful Faulkner novel works as an illustration of how a story about a final journey can have such an impact.

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Book review

The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer, 1974

The Conservationist is set during the period in which the racist apartheid regime governed South Africa. This deceptively simple but immensely powerful novel is a devastating portrait of a South African businessman who is unable to ‘conserve’ his position in society, and which foreshadows the eventual demise of the apartheid regime. Not for nothing was the novel banned in South Africa at the time of its publication.

Conservationist.jpg

The novel’s protagonist and principal narrator, Mehring, is a successful industrialist who has bought a farm a few miles outside the city where he lives. He drives out to the farm most weekends, past the ‘location’, the blandly neutral term for the township where most local black South Africans are forced to live. The farm is looked after for him by Jacobus, an obsequious black farm-manager, and a largely anonymous population of farm-hands and their families. Mehring has no interest in farming – he sets any losses he makes against his tax liabilities – and has no real links to the land. His farmhouse is a sterile empty sleeping place, luxurious compared to the damp quarters where the farmhands and their families are forced to sleep.

Gordimer narrates the events of the novel through Mehring’s stream of consciousness. This creates a dense narrative jumping freely between topics and time periods. This gives the text a dense, layered complexity. Mehring’s history including his divorce and his detached relationship with his teenage son, slowly emerges. As most readers will identify with the narrator, who presents all events from the most sympathetic point of view possible, it takes time for us to see Mehring as the unpleasant and unstable character he really is. His casual relationships with women for example are portrayed as adventurism rather than exploitative, and it is not until we are shown him assaulting a teenage girl during an aeroplane flight (he convinces himself the ‘encounter’ is consensual) that his predatory nature is fully exposed.

Similarly his racism is revealed slowly. He mainly avoid overtly racist language but is completely dismissive of the concerns of his workers, and accepts the status quo of apartheid without question. Progressive challenges to his ideas from his son and ex-wife are casually dismissed. (It was such a pleasure to read about the struggle to liberate Namibia as an independent country – Mehring dismisses even the name – knowing that a few years later it was to become a reality.) As well as being a lonely racist predator, Mehring is also a shell of a man devoid of any particular interests. The choice of him to carry the narrative weight of the novel almost completely on his own was a bold one. He’s not a nice man to spend a great deal of time with.

What elevates the novel from a simple portrait of an unpleasant, unthinking South African businessman is the incident which sparks the events of the narrative. One day a dead body is found on the farm. The death is clearly murder, but the police refuse to investigate – it’s just another dead black man – and bury the body where it was found, on Mehring’s farm. Although outraged by this – his farm isn’t a morgue! – Mehring does nothing to resolve the situation, and the body remains where it was buried in a shallow grave with no marker or memorial. As the novel progresses the body haunts Mehring, even though he is not apparently aware of the impression it has had on him. He returns obsessively to the field where it is buried, and the language of burial, death and decay starts to take over his thoughts and speech. At one point he even sleeps near the body, seeming to start to identify with the corpse. One night while walking in the field his foot gets caught in some mud, and he imagines the dead man is grabbing his leg, refusing to let him go, in a fairly literal playing out of his nightmares.

At the novel’s climax, as Mehring’s personal life continues to deteriorate and his state of mind crumbles, a biblical flood forces the remains of the body back to the surface, as was always going to happen one way or another. The metaphor is plain – the bodies of black South Africans will haunt the white supremacists until they are forced to confront their crimes and responsibilities. Without consulting Mehring Jacobus decides that the man deserves a proper burial this time and he is finally laid to rest.

This novel is a dramatic contrast to its fellow 1974 Booker prize winner, Holiday. Although there are superficial similarities – both are fairly thin in terms of events, both use a first person narrative structure – The Conservationist is dramatically more ambitious and bold in its scope and execution. It would be fascinating to contrast this novel with that of Gordimer’s fellow Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee, Disgrace. One is set years before the end of apartheid, where the way forward in terms of the dismantling of the racist South African regime was hard to navigate; the latter is set after the end of apartheid where people like Mehring are having to face the damage they have wrought on the country.

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Book review

Holiday by Stanley Middleton, 1974

Recent reviews of Stanley Middleton’s novel Holiday all mention the same handful of things – his prodigious output of work (over 40 novels published in his life), the journalistic stunt when the first few chapters of the novel were sent to publishers and comprehensively rejected, and of course the joint award of the 1974 Booker Prize.

Holiday is worth more consideration than these easy references. It is a portrait of a man in the course of a mid-life crisis. Edwin Fisher, a lecturer in Educational Philosophy, has recently experienced the death of his two-year old son Donald. His wife has been unable to cope with the trauma of Donald’s death and their marriage has reached breaking point. Edwin responds bizarrely, as we often do when under great stress – he books a week at the seaside in a boarding house hotel.

His internal monologue gives few clues to his distress. Mundane activities fill his day – sitting on the beach, eating lunch, whiling away the hours until dinner, chatting to strangers, all the time avoiding the real reason for his presence in this depressing seaside town. Fisher is well educated and teaches at the local university, but he has no problem in mixing with the people he meets. He flirts with various women, at one point coming close to having a brief fling with one of the other residents of his boarding house.

Not much else happens. Seaside towns have rarely been more humdrum; whiling away the hours between meals seems the main challenge. Edwin’s parents-in-law arrive at one point to attempt to rescue his failing marriage, all the time insisting on the fact that they are not there to interfere. They engineer a reunion of sorts between Edwin and his wife, although without any attempt at resolving the issues that forced them to part there seems little prospect of the reconciliation being successful in the long term.

I am at a loss to explain why Holiday won the Booker Prize. As well as its fellow joint winner, Nadine Gordimer’s much more interesting The Conservationist, it was short-listed alongside novels by Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge and C.P. Snow. The cover of this edition quotes the Telegraph describing Middleton as “the Chekov of suburbia”, which is preposterous. Holiday is little more than an extended sketch showing how disappointing the English seaside can be, making this locked-down reader yearn all the more for a return to foreign holidays.

P.S. I don’t normally comment on the edition of the novel I am reviewing, which usually seems fairly irrelevant. But the quality of this Windmill edition was appalling. (Windmill appear to be an imprint of Penguin – why the need for the subsidiary I don’t know!) It was full of mistakes and littered with typos. I don’t faint at the site of an out of place apostrophe, but this was something else. It spoke of a carelessness and cheapness – did they employ a proof-reader or just use an automated transcription service of some kind to save costs? Either way it isn’t good enough.

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