Monthly Archives: February 2022

Book review

Peter Carey’s 1988 Booker-prize winning Oscar and Lucinda tells the parallel stories of its eponymous characters: Oscar Hopkins, a disgraced clergyman, and Lucinda Leplastrier, owner of a glass factory. The novel is narrated by one of the Oscar’s descendants several generations later, who is always keen to point out the role random chance seems to have in determining their fate. Although they eventually meet on board a ship headed to Australia, for a large part of the novel their stories are separate.

Oscar is raised in remote Cornwall by his father who is a preacher in the Plymouth Brethren, a harshly non-conformist group which believes in the literal truth of the bible.

He (Oscar) comes to believe that God wants him to convert to Anglicanism, despite his father’s conviction that this means he is going to hell. But his conversion is also, incidentally, a means for him escape from rural Cornwall and achieve an education. At Oxford while training to become a priest Oscar discovers gambling, a sin he is never subsequently able to escape from. Whilst at university Oscar is a social outcast. His poverty marks him out, as does his other-worldly appearance and his complete lack of social skills. By chance he meets a fellow student, Wardley-Fish (a larger than life character I wish we had seen more of) who introduces him to the joys of gambling. At first his horse-racing winnings provide him with the funds to stay at Oxford, but his gambling – even on the Sabbath – eventually gets him into trouble, to the extent that the church authorities decide to exile him to Australia.

Lucinda’s story is also dominated by her fascination (or perhaps it is an addiction?) with gambling. She is orphaned when she is a young woman. She inherits the large farm in Australia her parents bought following a move from the UK. Not really knowing what to do with either her inheritance nor the rest of her life she spontaneously decides to buy a glassworks. Making a success of the business isn’t easy – the fiercely misogynistic glassblowers don’t even allow her to enter her own factory. At a loose end, Lucinda falls into the wrong crowd, and begins gambling on cards. A trip to London isn’t the way of rebooting her life she is looking for, but on the way back she meets Oscar.

Oscar’s terror of the sea – and large bodies of water more generally – means he is unable to socialise or move freely around the liner taking them to Australia. Nevertheless they bond over their mutual hobby, and Lucinda eventually invites Oscar to stay with her in Sydney. Their friendship develops and society is scandalised when they live together seemingly as man and wife, although in fact entirely innocently. Their relationship falters as Oscar is convinced Lucinda is in love with Reverend Hassett, a glass expert she consulted on the acquisition of her factory.

The finale of the novel involves a dangerous and improbable bet – Lucinda challenges Oscar to deliver a glass church to Reverend Hassett in his new living in Boat Harbour. Yes, a glass church. If that were not improbable enough, instead of taking the church by sea, Oscar’s fear of water means he has to travel overland, through largely uncharted territory. This fanciful expedition inevitably extracts a high price from them all.

Oscar and Lucinda could have been the great Australian novel. Carey is recorded as having said of his writing “My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country“. The colonisation of the continent by the British and others, and the impact this had on the indigenous peoples, is a theme which ripples through this novel, but always as the background to the lives of the central characters rather than ever being foregrounded as an issue. In the novel’s opening introductory chapter the narrator tells the reader a little about the area where he grew up, including the following:

“I learned long ago to distrust local history. Darkwood, for instance, they will tell you at the Historical Society, is called Darkwood because of the darkness of the foliage, but it was not so long ago you could hear people call it Darkies’ Point, and not so long before that when Horace Clark’s grandfather went up there with his mates – all the old families should record this when they are arguing about who controls the shire – and pushed an entire tribe of aboriginal men and women and children off the edge.”

This shocking massacre is part of settler history, and no worthy of further exploration. While other writers might think this story worth telling, in this novel it is just window-dressing, local ‘colour’. Oscar and Lucinda are both European settlers, as is almost everyone else they meet or mix with, while the indigenous Australians are virtually voiceless. Towards the end of the novel there are some brief exceptions to this rule – Kumbaingiri Billy, for example, a friend of the narrator’s father, is introduced as the source of the story of the glass church – but overwhelmingly this novel is about the experience of colonial Australia, in which European settlers struggle to come to terms with the challenges of the new world. That settler experience is only part of the story of Australia. Australia wasn’t invented or discovered by Europeans – I am pretty sure it was there all along and had been inhabited by people for thousands of years. While Carey doesn’t ignore that fact he really doesn’t address it at any length either. It is only recently, in A Long Way from Home for example, that Carey has finally started to address face-on what he has called “the fundamental, bloody circumstance of my country”. In the promotional interviews for that novel Carey said that “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.” The fact is he managed to do just that in this novel. I know it might seem strange to critique the novel Carey hasn’t written, and I understand his reasons for not feeling qualified to write about the aboriginal experience, but I can’t help feeling it was a huge missed opportunity.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey 1988

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Book review

“She is awake…”

That’s a great start to a novel! Who is ‘she’, and why is her awakening so important, so ominous? Sadly, after that this never really gets any better.

The Leviathan is set in Norfolk and is told in two threads, one set in a time of relative peace in 1703, and one sixty years earlier during the English Civil War. The narrator of both tales, Thomas Treadwater reflects on his time serving in Cromwell’s army. During a seasonal break in the fighting he returned home to nurse his wounds. His return was hastened by a letter from his sister who suspected a new servant of ‘drawing our father into corruptions’, alleging she was using witchcraft to do so. By the time Thomas reached their remote farm his father had had a stroke, the farm was in chaos, and the servant had been arrested on suspicion of being a witch. Thomas recollects his struggles to come to terms with what had happened as events snowball beyond his control.

There are a number of issues with The Leviathan, some of which I can discuss avoiding spoilers, others, sadly not. If that is likely to be a problem for you, and if you are planning to read the book, (and I admit, the premise is intriguing) don’t read on.

For a novel set in North Norfolk, an area of the country with a very specific geography, a sense of place is almost completely lacking. Apart from the fact that the Treadwater farm is set in remote countryside, we could be almost anywhere. What is so frustrating about this is that this part of the world has such a haunting atmosphere – huge skies, towering flint churches that seem wildly out of scale with their villages, coastal marshes and crumbling cliffs. Although most of the drainage windpumps that survive to this day were built later, at this time (i.e. in the seventeenth century) there would have been windmills stalking over across the flat landscape. What a missed opportunity this was. The sense of the period is captured very effectively – the world turned upside down – with parliament challenging the supreme authority of the monarch, but the sense of place is missing.

The novel opens as a fairly conventional story of witchcraft and witch-finding. The sinister and zealous Witchfinder Rutherford is introduced, but any expectation that he is going to be the novel’s villain is confounded when he goes missing, shortly after having proposed to Thomas’s young sister Esther. No-one seems particularly troubled by his absence, and that storyline is quietly dropped, as eventually is the witchcraft thread of the novel altogether. Why Esther would have accepted Rutherford’s proposal when she is – we later find out – not in any position to do so, is unexplained. Certainly the engagement is short lived! (Just to be clear, it is later suggested Esther had a sinister motive in accepting Rutherford, or in getting close to him, but the presentation of her acceptance is completely at odds with this motive. It appeared very inconsistent characterisation).

The introduction of John Milton to the novel as a character who helps resolve the mystery of the Leviathan is unconvincing and strange. He seems shoe-horned into the novel to provide it with some period detail, although his future as one of England’s greatest poets as well as his role as a radical figure within the Commonwealth Government goes largely unmentioned. Using historical figures as detectives in popular fiction has become a bit of a cliché recently, but Milton’s contribution to resolving the novel’s central mystery is in any event marginal. His presence is a wasted opportunity.

Thomas eventually finds out that his sister, Esther, has become possessed by a devil or demon. Their father rescued her from a shipwreck sixteen years earlier, and all this time the demonic entity has been lying dormant, sparked into life by the envy Esther feels towards her father’s new (and attractive) young servant. This makes some sense – Wikipedia tells me that Thomas Aquinas described the biblical Leviathan as the “demon of envy, first in punishing sinners”. But it is never made clear what the relationship is between the demonic entity that possesses Esther and the Leviathan itself, an enormous ship-crushing sea-monster. If I found The Essex Serpent disappointing in its non-existence, the literal appearance of the Leviathan was in many ways even more disappointing, and certainly less convincing. For horror to be effective it has to be credible, and while the ideas of witchcraft and possession have some basis in historical fact and can be explained by reference to actual phenomena, real-life sea-monsters summoned from the deep by demons are harder to believe.

My theory is that there was no sea monster, no Leviathan in the first draft of this novel. It was a story about witchcraft and possession, about faith and scepticism. The appearance of the great sceptic Milton in that novel makes complete sense. But then I suspect an editor read the novel in draft and suggested some changes that would make it more marketable (which to be fair is their job!). The book trade must have been looking for a successor to The Essex Serpent for some time (in the same way that I am sure editors are considering at this very moment the first chapters of The Tuesday Lunchtime Homicide Association penned by a moderately famous television presenter!). The Leviathan’s marketing leverages its apparent similarity to The Essex Serpent, not least in the serpentine design of the book’s cover. It’s not a coincidence that it was displayed in my local Waterstone next to copies of the Perry novel, nor that Goodreads describes it as “perfect for fans of The Essex Serpent.”

So The Leviathan 2.0 was (my theory goes) born, in which a storyline about a sea-serpent was grafted clumsily onto a witchcraft/demonic possession gothic horror novel. The joints show and creak. The remaining elements of the original horror story show some fairly obvious borrowing from nineteenth century gothic. As in Jane Eyre a mad-woman kept trapped in the attic breaks free and destroys the family home with fire. There’s also more than a hint of Wuthering Heights in the storyline whereby a foundling is taken in by a family living in a remote farmhouse who grows up with destructive urges, undermining the adoptive family from within.

There are some other issues with the unevenness of the narrative. When Thomas first returns to the family farm he sees dozens of sheep lying dead in the fields. The illness that has swept through the herds is quickly forgotten (as is the unpleasant job of disposing of the carcasses) and was obviously just added for atmosphere. Thomas’s infected and agonising war wound quickly disappears after a poultice is applied and he has a few days bed rest. And the end of the novel is confused and ambiguous. Gothic horror is always going to struggle in this context – either the author can resolve matters with a naturalistic/scientific explanation (it was the crusty old janitor wearing a mask all along) or the supernatural is real, witches and magic exists, and the reformation was all a lie. I’m not sure there is a correct answer to that conundrum, but if an author is going to invite us to believe in monsters and demons then they need to be summoned with a little more conviction.

The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews 2022

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Book review

There are plenty of websites that claim to be able to teach you how to write a novel. I haven’t investigated them in any detail, but I know that they offer guidance on how to structure the plot of one’s novel – of course they do. I have a strong hunch that one of the plot structures they suggest (if they don’t, they really should) would consist of parallel timelines following the novel’s characters in the present,

The God of Small Things By Arundhati Roy

alternating with chapters set much earlier, before a significant event which marks a turning point in their lives. In the present they look back on said formative event with regret, perhaps not having been able to move on with their lives, still haunted by the past etc; in the past they approach the event with no idea what is coming, blithely unaware of how their lives are to be changed forever. We the reader will know and can see the innocent steps they take towards disaster through the prism of that knowledge, perhaps guided by a wistful ‘little did I know’ narrator. Better still, keep the detail of the ‘event’ vague – tease the reader with the idea that something terrible or disastrous is about to happen, but leave the details to the novel’s climax.

Does that sound familiar? Would you want to read a novel with that structure? Or does it sounds a little like writing by numbers, following a formula that you have read a thousand times before. It’s a little more interesting that a simple chronological series of events, but it has its flaws. For a start there is really not that much suspense – we know something is going to happen which will change our characters’ lives, even if we don’t know what precisely that event is, and we know more importantly that they come through it alive if not unscathed. Reading the novel becomes a matter of waiting for the ‘event’ to be revealed. That, in a nutshell, was my experience of reading The God of Small Things. It felt too mannered, too much like an exercise in creative writing, too artificial. It prevented me from becoming immersed in the text and in believing in the characters. Which was obviously a pity, because the author clearly has immense potential.

The God of Small Things is a classically fragmented narrative. It is constructed around two periods in the lives of twins Estha and Rahel: in 1969 when they are seven, and then in 1993 when they finally reunite after the traumatic incident that forms the heart of the novel. The twins come from a wealthy, Syrian-Christian family living in India and in the 1969 storyline live in an extended family with their mother Ammu, grandmother Mammachi, uncle Chacko, and great-aunt ‘Baby’ Kochamma. The narrative uses multiple perspectives and voices, but principally is shown through the naïve eyes of the children. The tragic events are set in motion when Margaret Kochamma, uncle Chacko’s ex-wife, comes to visit the family from England with her daughter, Sophie Mol. We learn as early as page 4 that Sophie dies in the course of the visit, but how she comes to die, and who is held responsible for her death, is not explained until towards the end of the novel.

In the present, the trauma of Sophie’s death, and the twins’ subsequent separation, still echoes. They both return to the family home, now much run-down, and resume an adult version of their childhood existence.

Roy’s prose is dense and at times wonderful. It is not unusual for her to use three images in one sentence. They can when this happens become crowded and lose their impact. Take this example from the novel’s first page for instance:

“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire.”

Can ropes be like gunfire? Technically no, but of course the mind is agile enough to move from the initial metaphor (slanting silver ropes) to the simile (like gunfire) without being concerned with the apparent contradiction, in the same way we have no problem with Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. Notice also the dead metaphor (ploughing) lurking there in between the two more obvious images. Out of context like this the writing stands out – we can see the monsoon rain slanting down and hitting the dry earth, pitting it with holes, but the cumulative effect of the imagery can be a bit wearying. When Roy avoids trying to assure the reader than everything is like something else, and just allows things to be what they are, the prose is far more effective:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.”

Compare this to when the imagery takes over:

“Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past.”

The novel’s Romeo and Juliet storyline, in which the taboo against relationships between Touchables and Untouchables is broken, is intertwined with the children’s excited memories of going to the cinema to see the Sound of Music, driving in the family car, and playing in the grounds of the family home. Here the river at the end of the garden represents a border between order and chaos, the known and the unknown, civilisation and barbarism. Once the reader acclimatises to the novel’s splintered structure it becomes as absorbing read – we know tragedy is about to strike but need to understand how and why. I have to say I found the novel’s ending its weakest element. It was gratuitous, a way of abruptly bringing the novel to a close when the story had run its course. But although the relationship between the twins is ostensibly the heart of the novel, there are many other themes, characters and relationships that were of greater interest and which outweigh the disappointing conclusion.

The God of Small Things (I should confess now that I still don’t properly understand what or who the titular God of Small Things was) is a wonderfully rich and rewarding novel. Perhaps it is too easy to mock some of the more obvious elements of ‘creative writing’ as I have done in the opening paragraphs of this review (John Crace does an excellent job of parodying the novel’s excesses in this review in the Guardian). And it is fair to say that it won the Booker in an exceptionally weak year (you are unlikely to have heard of any of the other short-listed novels). But don’t let that mislead you: it would have been a contender in any year. It joins and deserves its place among the many other Booker winning novels set in India, such as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, Paul Scott’s Staying On, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, and of course the Booker of Bookers, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

PS I am not a massive fan of trigger warnings, but there is a scene of child sex abuse in this novel that you probably ought to be aware of. It’s written from the child’s perspective (frightened and confused) and while admittedly it adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the novel in the run up to the tragedy, I am not convinced it was needed.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, 1997

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Book review

The Water Dancer is a novel about slavery in America during the early nineteenth century. Anyone choosing to write about this topic has to decide early on how to convey the horror of slavery and how to bring the very familiar facts of the subject to life in a new way. Like Colson Whitehead in The Underground Railroad and Toni Morrison in Beloved, to name two relatively recent examples, Coates uses the supernatural to look afresh at this issue.

The Water Dancer (Coates novel).png

The novel is narrated by Hiram (Hi) Walker. Hi was born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, the son of the white plantation owner and his black mother. His mother was sold when Hiram was young, as are increasing numbers of the plantation’s slaves as the value of the tobacco crop dwindles. Hiram has a photographic memory, with one big exception – he can remember almost nothing about his mother.

The novel opens when Hiram is in his late teens. Driving a carriage across a bridge he has a vision of his mother, which causes the carriage to crash into the river below, drowning his half-brother Maynard.

And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.

Hiram miraculously survives, seemingly by being transported out of the river onto the bank. This incident introduces Hiram’s super-power which Coates calls ‘conduction’, the ability to use memory to transport himself and others through space, a power that he eventually uses to rescue himself and others from slavery.

I must admit to feeling conflicted about this unusual metaphor. The real members of the underground railroad did not have super-powers. Escaping from slavery must have been a terrifyingly dangerous undertaking. Does it diminish the risks people took to describe them in this way? Aren’t the bare facts of the enterprise sufficiently dramatic without the need to overlay a supernatural element to what happened? In all other respects the novel is entirely naturalistic, (Wikipedia ridiculously calls it ‘surrealist’, which is just plain wrong) and it is only with this one element, which it takes Hiram a long time to harness, that the paranormal is invoked. I had no similar concerns with Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, in which the railroad was strikingly imagined as a literal train, so why the reservations here? I assume the point being made is that remembering one’s ancestry is the key to a person’s strength and thus to one’s freedom. But is it? Remembering where we came from is important, of course, but freedom for the enslaved in nineteenth century Virginia was a much more urgent, practical matter of life and death, an urgency that seems largely missing in The Water Dancer, where freedom can be gained by holding hands and wishing hard. Remembering the past is surely far more important to today’s descendants of the enslaved – although even as I write that I recognise it is hardly my place to tell them what is and isn’t important to them!

Appropriately, the plot of The Water Dancer meanders. There’s nothing hurried in the series of events which takes Hiram out of Virginia into the underground railroad organisation, where he meets Harriet Tubman, who like him can ‘conduct’ people to freedom. Tubman – an almost mythical figure known as Moses – is convincingly sketched, and becomes a mentor to Hiram. He eventually makes his way back To his father’s plantation, with a plan to help others escape from slavery, but settles into a role as his father’s carer and seems in no hurry to leave.

Sadly I just really didn’t care that much about Hiram. He didn’t come alive as a character (unlike Harriet Tubman – she was very well realised and I would have been happy to spend a lot more time following her adventures). The horrors of slavery are not directly confronted in this novel – even to the extent of the euphemistic indirect language used. Being enslaved is described as being ‘tasked’, which seems to drain much of the historic impact from the original term. Similarly enforced prostitution is described as going to ‘the fancy’. In this version of slavery, when slaves run away they are captured and resold rather than the brutality described in other accounts of the period. Hiram is not recognised legally as his father’s son, but is called his son nonetheless, and given privileges that are closer to those of a domestic servant rather than a slave. Perhaps that’s the point. At one stage he attends an abolitionist rally and meets people campaigning for many other types of freedom – marriage, gender, work, religion. Coates identifies an early version of white guilt amongst the abolitionists Hiram meets in the North:

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”

Once Hiram discovers his conduction powers he does very little with them – it takes him almost all of the novel to perfect his abilities, and even then only one person is rescued. Similarly his photographic memory features only briefly in the novel – he uses it as a party trick before a gathering of Virginian slave-owners, who are impressed with his expertise. This scene like many others did not ring wholly true – surely the racist Southern gentry would have felt threatened by such an obvious demonstration of the enslaved’s intelligence, when their whole existence was predicated on the ideology that black people were sub-human?

I’ve got to be honest about my feelings about this book. There was plenty to enjoy, but the whole was much less than the sum of the parts. It had little or no suspense despite the extraordinarily dramatic setting, the plot dragged, and the supernatural elements seemed shoe-horned in for interest rather than forming the core of the novel. I hope there’s a lot more to come from this author and we can look back at this as a good first attempt, but of course that’s never guaranteed – we shall see.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2019

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