Author Archives: The Reading Bug

Book review

Orwell dismissed A Clergyman’s Daughter as “tripe” and more bluntly as “bollocks”, and prevented it from being reprinted during his lifetime. He thought it even worse than Keep the Aspidistra Flying, as “it was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money”.

Is it really that bad, or was this simply false modesty?

Dorothy Hare, 28 years old and single, works tirelessly as an unpaid curate (vicar’s assistant) to her father, the rector of Knype Hill, a small town based (it is believed) on Southwold in Suffolk, where Orwell’s parents lived after they retired from service in India. Dorothy is run ragged by the responsibilities of the parish and her household. Her father is feckless and totally unsympathetic, so she takes the weight of the whole parish on her shoulders, from running the girl guides and Mothers’ Union, to typing up his sermons and visiting the sick. One day, following a particularly challenging day’s work, she is sexually assaulted by Mr Warburton, an aging lothario who casually attempts to seduce her (as he sees it). This assault triggers an episode of amnesia for Dorothy, who wakes up several days later in the Old Kent Road wearing a new set of clothes. How she got to London from Suffolk is never explained. Knype Hill society assumes she has eloped with Warburton, who has conveniently gone on a long European trip at exactly the same time.

Dazed, confused and extremely vulnerable, Dorothy joins a group travelling to Kent for the hop-picking season. Slowly her memory returns and she writes to her father explaining her situation and asking for help. When no reply comes she assumes she is persona non-grata and at the end of the hop season she travels back to London. Once her money runs out she ends up living on the street joining a group of tramps in Trafalgar Square. The chapter describing the night spent sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square is written experimentally, with a nod to Ulysses, in play format. As the cold worsens and lack of sleep leads to exhaustion, Dorothy enters an almost dream-like state which only ends when she is arrested and imprisoned for vagrancy.

Dorothy’s father meanwhile, has reached out to his well-to-do cousin, Sir Thomas Hare, to try and find Dorothy and help her. Bringing her home seems out the question, the implication being that the rector believes the rumours that she has eloped, despite her reassurances to the contrary. Sir Thomas has an efficient man-servant who quickly tracks Dorothy down – easily enough as she is in custody – and finds a job for her in a small private school run by the monstrous Mrs Creevy. At first Dorothy enjoys attempting to awaken her students’ dormant interest in learning, but these attempts are quickly quashed when parents protest about the lack of focus on practical learning, writing and mathematics. The children rebel, understandably, but the issue quickly becomes moot when Mrs Creevy dismisses her without notice when she finds a replacement.

There is just time for Mr Warburton to appear out of the blue as Dorothy’s unlikely saviour and to take her back to Knype Hill. Here she quickly resumes her old routine. Although she has now lost her faith she still retains a belief in the value of service to others and this is where the novel closes.

A key element of the plot of A Clergyman’s Daughter is Dorothy’s loss of memory. Orwell uses this plot device to send her on a journey round his old haunts – hop-picking in Kent, dossing down in Trafalgar Square, and teaching in private schools in the suburbs. We are invited to believe that exhaustion combined with her distress at Mr Warburton’s sexual assault triggers this amnesia. There’s no attempt to explain how she finds herself in London in a new set of clothes, or anything that happens to her in the meantime. What we do now know is that in an earlier draft of the novel Warburton’s attack is more explicitly described as an attempted rape. I think we would today see the surviving description as such an event anyway, but the point is that to an 1930’s audience the description could more easily be dismissed as a clumsy attempt at seduction.

This sentence jumped from chapter Chapter 5 (page 285 in the Penguin classic edition):

“It was one of those bright cold days which are spring or winter according as you are indoors or out.”

Ring any bells? Here’s the first line from 1984:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

The re-use of content from Orwell’s journalism is blatant. Reportage from Down and Out in Paris and London and Orwell’s hop-picking diaries are shoe-horned into the novel on only the flimsiest of pretexts. The later chapter on Dorothy’s time as a school-teacher is also largely autobiographical. Orwell certainly wasn’t the first writer to re-purpose some of his journalism into novel format – Raymond Chandler for example welded his shorter stories written for magazine publication into novels such as The Big Sleep – but this is clumsily done.

There are also some horribly out-dated attitudes on display in this novel. Of course there is always the defence that these are his characters’ views not the novelists, but that defence feels weak in a novel which relies so heavily on reportage, and where the same attitudes are reflected elsewhere in both his novels and his journalism. For example here is the narrator’s description of the travellers at the hop farm:

Quite half the pickers in the set were gypsies—there were not less than two hundred of them in the camp. Diddykies, the other pickers called them. They were not a bad sort of people, friendly enough, and they flattered you grossly when they wanted to get anything out of you; yet they were sly, with the impenetrable slyness of savages. In their oafish, Oriental faces there was a look as of some wild but sluggish animal—a look of dense stupidity existing side by side with untameable cunning. 118

Another troubling aspect of the novel is the views expressed on the working class. There is plenty of evidence here and elsewhere in his work to suggest that lower-upper-middle-class, privately educated, Old Etonian Eric Blair thought that working class people smell – not least because he tells us more than once that he did. This is a contentious view, I appreciate, and there has been a surprising amount written on either side of the issue. It was already a debate while Orwell was still alive and writing, used by his political opponents to undermine his arguments. But for someone who didn’t really think the working classes smell there’s an awful lot of references to the smelliness of the working class.

In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell defined the attitude of his class towards the working class as “an attitude of sniggering superiority, punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred.” At times some of that approach emerges, perhaps subconsciously, in his work.

Consider this description from the first chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter, while Dorothy does her parochial visits:

Dorothy knocked at the Pithers’ badly fitting door, from beneath which a melancholy smell of boiled cabbage and dish-water was oozing. From long experience she knew and could taste in advance the individual smell of every cottage on her rounds. Some of their smells were peculiar in the extreme. For instance, there was the salty, feral smell that haunted the cottage of old Mr Tombs, an aged retired bookseller who lay in bed all day in a darkened room…. In nearly all the cottages there was a basic smell of old overcoats and dish-water upon which the other, individual smells were superimposed; the cesspool smell, the cabbage smell, the smell of children, the strong, bacon-like reek of corduroys impregnated with the sweat of a decade.

Orwell addresses this issue face on elsewhere in The Road to Wigan Pier:

“Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West–the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.

…..in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were dirty. Very early in life you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body; you would not get nearer to it than you could help. You watched a great sweaty navvy walking down the road with his pick over his shoulder; you looked at his discoloured shirt and his corduroy trousers stiff with the dirt of a decade; you thought of those nests and layers of greasy rags below, and, under all, the unwashed body, brown all over (that was how I used to imagine it), with its strong, bacon-like reek. “

You’ll notice the language from Wigan Pier, which was published in 1937, echoes much of that in the earlier passage from Clergyman’s – ‘bacon-like’, ‘sweat/dirt of a decade’ etc.

A Clergyman’s Daughter isn’t really a bad novel. But it shows every sign of being quickly thrown together: the characters are two-dimensional, the plot is a mess and the discussion on faith which closes the text is perfunctory at best, tacked on to give some much needed but unconvincing depth. Another one for Orwell completists only.

A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell, 1935

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Book review

When We Were Orphans is very nearly a great novel. I am probably going to spend most of this post explaining why it is nearly great, and how it just falls short. But first, a quick plot summary. It’s important as always to understand that these summarises iron out the plot in a very unrepresentative way, particularly so in a novel such as this where the time structure is so complex. The narrator is Christopher Banks, who when we first meet him is an aspirational detective having recently graduated from

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Cambridge, ‘setting himself up in the world’ in London. Over the course of several chapters Christopher slowly tells the reader the story of his childhood in Shanghai. When he was ten his father, a businessman involved in the opium trade, went missing. Christopher was convinced (at the time, and remains so) that he was kidnapped. A few weeks later his mother, who had been vocally active in opposition to the opium trade, also disappeared. After weeks without any sign of them, he was eventually sent back to live with a maiden aunt in Shropshire, and from there on to public school. In the present, Christopher recounts several meetings with former school-friends as well as an attractive and ambitious young woman, Sarah Hemmings, who incidentally is an orphan, and comes to play an important role in his life.

Time passes, and we are told that Christopher has become a successful detective. His detection skills are such that he can visit the scene of a crime several months after the event, and still discern sufficient evidence to solve the crime. While are always told about these abilities by Christopher they are never demonstrated or explained in any detail – the crime are just solved. Despite any natural scepticism – is he really as good at solving crime as he thinks he is – his skills are widely recognised and lauded. This work is in preparation for his most important case, a return to China to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his parents. This return is much delayed, and matters are complicated when he – seemingly spontaneously – adopts a young Canadian orphan, but finally after several years he returns to Shanghai and begins to try to solve his parents’ case. His work is a matter of much public interest and his success is so much taken for granted that he is asked to confirm details of the arrangements for the ceremony when his successfully located parents are returned to freedom. However the deepening conflict between China and Japan makes the investigation even more complex than it would otherwise have been, and it is only at the last moment that the secret of what happened to his parents is revealed.

While reading When We Were Orphans – and I read it in one compelling sitting – two authors came to mind as comparators to help me make sense of what was going on (because at times, what was going on made no sense!). One obvious influence seemed to be Kafka. Christopher is disorientated, struggling through a world that increasingly no longer complies with the ordinary rules of behaviour, where strangers know more about him that he expects, and where the landscape becomes strangely fluid and confusing. Christopher is unable to satisfactorily explain what happens to him in the novel. Frequently his view of the world seems dramatically at odds with the people he meets. His memories of school vary wildly from former schoolfriends (to emphasise the point Ishiguro has this happen twice). People look at him strangely when he makes everyday comments. He gets angry when people misrepresent events from his past:

For gradually, from behind his cheerful anecdotes, there was emerging a picture of myself on that voyage to which I took exception. His repeated insinuation was that I had gone about the ship withdrawn and moody, liable to burst into tears at the slightest thing. No doubt the colonel had an investment in giving himself the role of an heroic guardian, and after all this time, I saw it was as pointless as it was unkind to contradict him. But as I say, I began to grow steadily more irritated.

There is a common perception among the people he meets that his investigation will in some unspoken way do more than locate his parents (who he unquestioningly believes are still alive) but also resolve the growing military and political tension between Japan and China which threatens to spill over into an international conflict.

The Kafkaesque atmosphere of the novel intensifies when the search for his parents reaches its climax. Working his way on foot through the ruins of a slum on the frontline between the Japanese and Chinese forces, he meets a badly wounded Japanese soldier who may or may not be his childhood friend Akira. They finally reach the building Christopher has become convinced is the place where his parents are being held, but inevitably he is wrong. He is whisked away by the Japanese forces and safely returned to the British consulate where he finds out the real fate of his parents.

Another type of unreliable narrator, where the author slowly and deliberately exposes the narrator’s delusions, and a more convincing ‘reality’ is shown, is more closely associated in my mind with Nabokov, and in particular with his extraordinary Pale Fire. For a long time I expected to find out that Christopher’s descriptions of his prowess as a detective, his childhood memories of his life in Shanghai, and his status within the ex-patriate community, were going to be revealed as delusional, (possibly as a result of an addiction to opium, which would have been ironic!). But while his account of his story is clearly flawed, the essential elements are apparently reliably narrated. He is, everyone agrees, an extremely successful detective, his prowess is widely recognised and appreciated, and he does survive the arduous journey along the front-line of the battle of Shanghai. Which leaves the many instances in which he is baffled by the behaviour of others around him, and they by him, unexplained. Ian McEwan does something similar in Enduring Love where the hints throughout the novel that the narrator’s account of the ballooning accident is flawed come to nothing, and the final chapters confirm that everything we have been told is true despite the many improbabilities and suggestions that ‘something’ is wrong with the account.

Why include scene after scene emphasising the unreliable nature of Christopher’s narration only to finally confirm its essential accuracy?

There are a couple of other issues I wanted to mention before closing. In a Guardian review of the novel, Philip Hensher focussed on the slightly awkward phrasing of much of Christopher’s narration:

“Ishiguro’s avoidance of phrasal verbs is a major problem here – it gives his narrator a circumlocutious, cautious air which isn’t really very helpful. More than that, it gives him a particular tone of voice which is not that of his social setting. It is bizarrely unconvincing as an idea of upper-middle-class London in the 1930s – I think Ishiguro will find that society beauties did not say ‘pardon’ then and do not now – and the inadequacy can be pinned down to the narrator’s voice, and his choice of verbs, as much as the details. “

This comment breaks a fundamental rule of reading, which is that if you notice something ‘off’ about a novel don’t just assume that it is a weakness in the author’s abilities as a writer (especially as we are talking about someone who had already won the Booker in 1989 with Remains of the Day). Instead ask the question – why? Why does it sound as if English is not the speaker’s first language? Could it be that Ishiguro is trying to convey the fact that Christopher lived for the first ten years of his life in China and is not convincingly part of the upper-middle-class world he circulates in? Is his fractured relationship with reality being conveyed here with his ‘circumlocutious, cautious air’? Giving a character a specific voice to illustrate their character wouldn’t be that revolutionary a technique would it?

Not wanting to end on too negative a note, but the novel’s description of the ‘fate’ of Christopher’s mother is grotesque and plays to very out-dated cliches about the Chinese. I’m not going to dwell on this or be more specific, and I am sure such things did happen occasionally, but it’s needlessly distressing.

So why ‘nearly great’? Even Ishiguro himself accepted that ‘it’s not my best book’. If he had been able to conclude the novel with an explanation that allowed the reader to make sense of Christopher’s confusion, his apparent ability to solve long-past crimes with the aid of just his slightly ridiculous, sub-Holmesian magnifying glass, and the many conversations where there is obviously a big gap between what he tells us and what is ‘actually’ perceived by the other characters, then the novel would have been an exciting mystery. I still enjoyed reading the novel, but I was so disappointed in the lacklustre ending where everything that had been promised failed to materialise.

When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2000

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Book review

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.”

Post Office is an almost entirely autobiographical account of Bukowski’s years working for the US Postal Service in Los Angeles throughout the 1950’s and 60’s. It was written over the course of three weeks immediately following his decision to leave the Post Office and write full-time. “I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” Bukowski had written poetry and for magazines since the 1940’s, (he was born in 1920) but this was to be his first novel. It contains a lot of detail about the role of an American postman, and as such there is an unlikely parallel with another memoir of someone working in this role at about the same time in the UK, Alan Johnson’s Please Mr Postman.

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The speed with which the text was written and its reliance on his personal experiences are the dominant features of the novel. These are both positives and weaknesses. The unfiltered nature of the narrative – Bukowski is brutally frank about all aspects of his life, his gambling, drinking and womanising – gives the text a raw immediacy. But there is a contradiction between the image Bukowski projects of his life as a complete nihilist and the fairly mundane existence of a postman and mail clerk. There is enough detail in the novel for the reader to understand that Bukowski – or strictly speaking, Chinaski, the author’s avatar here – took his work as a postman seriously, and kept working hard at his job despite being badly treated by an unsympathetic supervisor, terrible weather, and the ubiquitous ankle-biting dogs. Chinaski may have gone to work with a hangover every day, smelling of booze, he may have cheated at his postal service exams, he may have been written up for insubordination and lateness all the time, but he stuck at the job for a decade or more.

In terms of its plot, Post Office is insubstantial. Chinaski gets a job as a substitute post man, which he works half-heartedly at for a few years until he quits to become a professional ambler. Inevitably this can’t last forever, however scientific his approach, so he goes back to working for the Post Office as a mail clerk. His relationships during this period are casual and based on a shared enthusiasm for alcohol. The novel ends with copies of disciplinary letters sent to him – I think it is fair to say these were almost certainly replicas of letters Bukowski would have received – warning him against lateness etc, and finally with his decision to quit and become a full-time writer. But the plot is not really the point of the novel – it is a sketch of a counter-cultural life-style, living within the system (because where else is there?) but rejecting its norms and standards. Getting drunk becomes an act of rebellion; not trying hard at work a blow against society.

John Martin, the founder of Black Sparrow Press, who was responsible for launching Bukowski’s career, has explained that “he is not a mainstream author and he will never have a mainstream public.” This is an odd thing to say about a poet who sold millions of books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Bukowski has been more recently been called “an established part of the 20th-century literary canon“, an observation which I suspect he would have hated. The New Yorker in a recent review called him “the man who occupies the most shelf space of any American poet”. That’s the contradiction inherent in the life of any writer or artist who struggles to live and work outside the mainstream of society but whose success eventually leads to them being courted and adopted by the very same society they reject.

It’s always difficult for a modern reader when out-dated attitudes are portrayed uncritically in texts. There’s the temptation to offer excuses – the author is just reflecting the consensus of views at the time, and one should not confuse the views of the characters with those of the author, however closely we are encouraged to see the two. Sometimes these points are sustainable, but I don’t think they will stand up to any scrutiny here. Yes Post Office is a product of its time, as are all novels, and yes it is a work of fiction, but there are some painful misogynistic attitudes represented in the novel, including a scene where Chinaski appears to rape a woman on his post round. This is an integral and difficult part of the dark, farcical element which overshadows Bukowski’s prose. He is arguably the post-war heir to Henry Miller. Both their work was self-consciously rule-breaking, transgressive, nihilistic and focused on people living on the margins of society. They also share a brutal attitude towards women. Of course Miller was writing in the 1930’s when there were a lot more taboos about discussing sex than there were thirty years and one World War later. The question I am not sure about is whether Bukowski had anything more to say than Miller, and whether his work has stood the test of time imposed by the last fifty years or so?

Post Office by Charles Bukowski, 1971

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Book review

I received a host of superb books this Christmas which will form the heart of my reading for at least the first part of 2022. These include:

A signed copy of Bob Mortimer’s autobiography, And Away;

Post Office, Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical account of his time working for the US Post Office – there couldn’t be much more of a contrast with the Bob Mortimer text!

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates – not a novel I would normally have bought for myself, which I cannot stress strongly enough is a good thing. I want to read outside my comfort zone, and this looks as if it definitely falls into that category;

The Promise, Damon Galgut’s 2021 Booker Prize winner, which will also maintain my push to complete the Booker list (only eight novels left on this list now which gives me a good chance of finishing it in 2022, although some of them are quite hefty);

A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell. One of my very low-key reading targets is to read Orwell’s minor novels. I’ve read Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying thus far, so A Clergyman’s Daughter will be a good addition to the list. Technically this will be a re-read in that I first read this back in school for an Orwell project – but as that was over 40 years ago it is hardly surprising that all I can remember is a scene where the eponymous character explains to her students the meaning of the phrase “Macduff was from his mothers womb untimely ripped” which causes quite a stir.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe which has been on my must-read list now for so long.

Charles Dickens – a biography by Michael Slater, to accompany my 2022 Dickens which is going to be Great Expectations;

When we were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. Not one of his better known novels, and as far as I know it has not been televised/filmed, but the premise – an unsolved mystery story – looks intriguing;

The New Elites by George Walden – a really timely commentary on why things have gone so badly wrong for the UK in recent years. I suspect I will have a lot to argue about with this book!

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak – another book well outside my comfort zone (again, a very good thing) which I am looking forward to;

Finally, I also plan to re-read Persuasion this year; the last of the major Jane Austen novels I have yet to review.

What with the above and finishing A Suitable Boy, this will be enough to keep me busy for well into 2022 I suspect.

My reading plans for 2022

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Book review

At the moment I am working my way diligently through Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. At 1500 pages my review isn’t going to appear here anytime soon, so in the meantime I thought you might enjoy this quote from the immortal Granny Weatherwax, which can be found in Sir Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters:

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

Not very seasonal at all, I know, but for some reason it seemed right for these strange days.

Granny Weatherwax’s thought for the day

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Book review

I mentioned this novel in passing in my review of Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question earlier this month, so when I came across it in a local second-hand bookshop it seemed like fate. I’ve gone off Kingsley Amis over the years. I started out as a big fan – I loved Lucky Jim – but the more I read of him, and about him, the less I liked his attitudes to women and ethnic minorities and the more I saw those attitudes reflected in his novels, particularly those he published towards the end of his career. These novels, such as Stanley and the Women and Jake’s Thing often degenerated into self-parodies in which the central character bore a strong resemblance to Amis himself, who always wound up in bed with the young and attractive women characters.

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I am glad to say The Alteration is an exception to that rule. It is an alternative history novel set in an England where the reformation never took place. Writers of alternative histories usually chose more recent historical events as the moment from which to diverge their timelines. Sarajevo 1914 perhaps, the various turning points of the second world war (for example, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) or the rise of fascism in the 1930’s (for example Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America). Here Amis goes all the way back to Tudor England. Henry 7th first son, Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, married Catherine of Aragon in 1501 and died less than a year later, leaving Henry 8th to inherit the throne. Whether their marriage was ever consummated became a fierce point of contention after Arthur’s death and Catherine’s remarriage to Henry. Amis imagines that Arthur didn’t die prematurely and that he and Catherine went on to have a son who becomes king. This is the butterfly effect moment from which a whole series of changes to English and world history flow – no break with Rome, no Church of England, and no Reformation.

The world of 1976 is recognisable but very different to our own as these changes have rippled across the world. Catholicism is the dominant religion across Western Europe, with a muted version of Protestantism existing only in North America, now the Republic of New England. Ireland is “West-England” and Scotland “North-England”. The English Isles are a theocracy run by the priesthood with church law brutally enforced by the Holy Office, a secret police. In this timeline Himmler and Beria are mentioned as priests doing god’s work by suppressing dissent and punishing apostasy – Amis’s point being evil will always find means of coming to the surface.

Europe has emerged very differently without the Reformation. Royal families still rule Portugal, Sweden, France and Russia, and the Italian and Germany nation-states have not formed (due, it is implied, to the strength of the Papacy). Western Europe is in perpetual conflict with the Ottoman Empire, in a manner very reminiscent of both the wars of 1984 and the Cold War. This long-running conflict serves to give the people a common enemy and even more cynically acts as a way of keeping the population in check. The novel portrays the papacy as a brutal manipulator of geo-political forces, cynically engineering war to help keep the population under control when more direct biological warfare experiments have failed.

Culture and the arts have also developed very differently in this alternative world, although again Amis insists that the great artists would have emerged one way or another. Shakespeare’s plays are banned but survived and are performed in New England. Shelley, Mozart, Beethoven, Blake, Hockney and Holman Hunt are all named-checked but are now religious writers or musicians in the service of the Church. The other significant difference in this world is the approach to technology. “Science” is disapproved of by the church, electricity is banned, and planes are yet to be invented. Instead steam is the dominant technology – this is literally a steam-punk world.

This is all by way of background to the fairly slight plot. The title refers not simply to the altered world but also to one specific person in it, namely Hubert Anvil, a ten-year old chorister. He has the voice of an angel and the Church decides to preserve it from the predations of puberty by castrating him. The history of castrati and the involvement of the Catholic Church in the practice of castrating young men to preserve their high voices is a fascinating one – the last known castrati died only 100 years ago. This is not a novel where the pros and cons of allowing young boys to be castrated are weighed carefully – Amis is clear this is an abomination, a form of abuse derived from the Church’s distorted attitudes towards sex. (The vows of chastity taken by members of the church and its hierarchy are widely ignored.) The narrative core of the novel follows Hubert’s attempts to evade this fate, running away to London and seeking help from the New England ambassador. Amis deploys a crude deus ex machina to end the novel, suggesting that he loses interest in his characters once his points about the church and its damaging role in society had been scored.

Amis really commits to his concept, and paints a very detailed picture of life at all levels in his alternative timeline. It’s this exploration that seems to interest him and the narrative in which Hubert runs away is not that exciting or convincing. The author makes his views on the Catholic church’s attitudes towards sexuality very clearly and the reader is left in no doubt about the dangers of mixing church and state. The absence of adulterous middle-aged avatars for Amis and his friends was a bit of a relief, even if The Alteration was to prove a short term diversion from the main business of grumpily chronicling yet another alcoholic affair.

The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, 1976

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Book review

Breakfast of Champions has sat on my bookshelves for so long I somehow fooled myself into thinking I had read it. How it came to be there unopened and unread will remain a mystery. It is a chaotic novel about writing a novel, the most ‘meta’ work I think I have ever read. Vonnegut doesn’t just tell the reader they are reading a novel, he kicks down the fourth wall and dances on the rubble. It’s also illustrated on almost every page with very simple drawing that to be honest add little to teh narrative but fill in some space.

The narrative structure is based around a series of events that lead up to the meeting between one of Vonnegut’s regular characters, Kilgore Trout, a prolific and heroically unsuccessful and unappreciated science fiction writer, and Dwayne Hoover, a businessman who is slowly going insane.

But this is not really a novel that can accurately be described as being ‘about’ anything, certainly nothing as simple as a story of characters doing things in a linear ‘this, then this’ fashion. It’s far too anarchic for that. The time structure is random, even though the traditional ordering of cause and effect keeps trying to reassert itself. Ostensibly the novel tells how Trout travels to the Midland City Arts Festival. Even though his stories are usually published as filler in pornographic magazines, he has one supporter who also happens to be a sponsor the Arts festival and who arranges for Trout to be a guest speaker at the event. He travels there via New York where he gets beaten up by “The Pluto Gang” (I couldn’t work out why, it just feels like a scene inserted at random) and then hitchhikes to the festival. Meanwhile in Midland City Hoover’s mental health deteriorates. They finally meet at the Holiday Inn where Trout’s bizarre behaviour seems to trip Hoover over the edge. He goes berserk, attacking people at random, biting Trout’s finger off, and ends up being committed to an asylum. The novel ends with Trout meeting the narrator author, who demonstrates his omniscience by sending Trout through space and time.

This is a strongly political novel. Trout sees America from the point of view of an outsider. He is acutely aware of the ridiculous elements of society, its injustices and not least its obsession with sex (every male character is introduced with a description of the length and girth of their penis – every female character is introduced with a description of the dimensions of the husbands/boyfriend’s penis). This is Vonnegut’s/the narrator’s explanation for the obsessive description of every mundane object he encounters, the rejection of any element of traditional storytelling:

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. 

Racism is a persistent theme in Breakfast of Champions. The black characters are treated appallingly (and upsettingly) by many of the white characters and are described as being used “for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.” This is probably why Vonnegut casually and repeatedly uses the n-word in a way that writers working today simply would not consider. It makes it an uncomfortable read.

description

The other central theme in the novel is the concept that humans are all simply machines, all of us that is except Vonnegut or perhaps Trout or the narrator. This idea, that we are all really just meat machines without free will, is one of the oldest philosophical conundrums in existence. Vonnegut introduces the idea as a statement of fact rather than a debating point, and it underlines his sense of alienation from his characters – we the readers are all just characters without autonomy in a story told by an idiot who doesn’t really understand the world.

This is a very unconventional novel. It has some of the trappings of a traditional story – two characters destined to meet at the end of the novel, having adventures on the way – but the reader is consistently reminded the are just reading a story, that the characters and settings aren’t real, and that the author can capriciously change their fates whenever he so chooses. The insistent definitions of mundane objects underlines this pointlessness. It all combines to make Breakfast of Champions a challenging and interesting read, but not one I would be able to really recommend. It many ways it is not a novel at all, but a book of random thoughts and ideas, strung together round a storyline which even the author doesn’t find interesting.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, 1973

Aside
Book review

I know my review of Jacobson’s The Finkler Question was probably a bit harsh, so I thought I would give him another try. I’ve had Redback on my book shelves, sitting unread and unloved for goodness knows how long, so it seemed an obvious supplemental read to Finkler.

Jacobson isn’t alone amongst novelists for mining his past for material in his early novels. Redback‘s central character, Karl Leon Forelock comes from the northern English town of Partington, the wettest spot in Europe (Jacobson grew up in Prestwich which is in Greater Manchester). Partington is the most depressing, crime ridden and deprived town in the universe – Jacobson obviously didn’t have particularly happy memories of Prestwich! Forelock somehow manages to gain a place at Cambridge, eventually graduating with a double starred first in Moral Decencies from Malapert college. (Jacobson went to Downing College where he studied English, and emerged with the slightly less impressive 2:2). After university Forelock secures funding from the CIA to go to Australia. It’s never clear what he is supposed to be doing for the CIA there – there’s no-one in particular to spy on, and all he seems to do is go to parties. The publisher’s summary of the novel says his role is to “teach the Australians how to live” which is meaningless surely? Anyway, it gives Jacobson a reason to take his character to Australia where Jacobson himself spent three years teaching, and this is where the majority of the events of the novel take place.

The novel’s descriptions of the Australian wildlife and way of life is tired and cliche-ridden – we know Australian abounds with dangerous and poisonous animals. Australians probably wouldn’t mind the novel’s portrayal of themselves as heavy drinkers and uncultured but again no cliche is left on the shelf. As the novel’s publisher puts it: “Leon quickly discovers that there are some natives who believe that they have an education to pass on in return. But it is at the hands of the women in Australia that Leon receives his most painful, and on occasions his most pleasurable, lessons.” Which sounds awful doesn’t it? They are trying to promote the novel as a sex comedy, and while there are element of ‘Carry On Down Under’ about the whole affair (Forelock has a prolonged menage a trois with a pair of enthusiastic Australian synchronised swimmers for example) the comedy has not aged well.
Throughout the novel the narrator (Forelock) refers every few pages to his having received a bite from a Redback spider that drastically changes his character and outlook on life (although sadly not his attitudes towards women):

“in a foul, dilapidated bush privy, way up in the Bogong high plains, the Redback sucks her teeth and waits her turn.“

This bite only comes at the very end of the novel, and it’s not clear why it changes his character, in what way, and why the reader should care. If this is symbolism for a traumatic and transformative experience then I am not sure what it stands for, but by this point I didn’t care either.

The blurb to the Bantam Press hardback edition of Redback claims that “the author is the most devastatingly funny novelist writing in English today” Not “one of the most devastatingly funny writers” but “the most devastating”, and not just of English writers but of those “writing in English”. That was a bold claim given that in 1987 when this novel was first published Douglas Adams was writing the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Terry Pratchett was writing The Colour of Magic, and Stella Gibbons, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Sue Townsend to name just a few were still active. Kingsley Amis to whom Jacobson owes the most obvious debt had just won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils. If that hyperbole wasn’t enough, the blurb back page also quotes the Sunday Times as describing Jacobson as “the most dangerously funny writer in the English language”, a quote that is still used on the book’s listing on Amazon and elsewhere to this day, although I wasn’t able to track it down to source. I know ‘quite amusing but not laugh out loud funny’ wouldn’t have sold as many books, but it would have been a lot more honest.

One of the principles of comic writing Jacobson outlined in his speech to the Royal Literary Society I referenced in my previous post was not to give your characters ‘funny’ names, because Dickens had used them all. This was obviously a lesson learnt from experience, because almost all the characters in Redback have unfunny funny names: Montserrat Tomlinsom, Vance Kelpie, Hartley Quibell, Ruddles Carmody, etc, etc. The comedy is also very crude at times, not least in the novel’s opening anecdote when undergraduate Forelock meets “a wholesome young Australian girl with powerful mandibles and an MA in fine art“. They hit it off, but in his rooms later that evening, “after a heavy supper of pasta and fish … the chemistry decides to play up” and the sex misfires. “He falls asleep on his back with a fart and sweats and snores“. He wakes in the morning, “relieved to discover that the girl has gone; but an odd feeling, an unaccustomed tingling of the skin, a sensation of discomfort and unease around the heart, causes him, still on his back, to cast an eye over his person, whereupon he finds that she has left a little memento of herself – a Freudian gift, hard, compact, warm, in its own way perfectly formed, a faecal offering smelling of fish and pasta (of tagliatelle marinara) – nestling amongst the soft hairs of his chest, only inches from his gaping mouth.”

If you find that funny, Redback might be the novel for you. But I found it entirely forgettable – I only finished a few days ago but in the course of writing this review had to go back and check how it ends (did I really finish it?) only to find that it doesn’t really end at all, it just peters out. Like this review.

Redback by Howard Jacobson, 1987

Aside
Book review

The Finkler Question was Howard Jacobson’s eleventh novel. He has continued to publish a new work every other year (or thereabouts) since his first book Coming from Behind came out in 1983. The choice of The Finkler Question as winner of the 2010 Booker Prize was not particularly controversial (compared to many previous awards) – the field was strong, including works by Peter Carey, Damon Galgut and Andrea Levy, but it had been well reviewed and strongly tipped to win. Reviewers compared it favourably to Philip Roth and even Lewis Carroll! It was however unusual amongst Booker winners in that it was – ostensibly – a comic novel, the first of its kind to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils in 1986.

I appreciate ‘comic novel’ is a fairly loose category. In a 2015 lecture Jacobson himself gave to the Royal Society of Literature he offered these tips on how to write (and therefore what constitutes) a comic novel:

“Don’t try to be funny. The best comedy arises out of an embarrassment of seriousness.

Don’t give characters funny names. (Dickens used them all up)

Underwear isn’t funny. Neither are exclamation marks.

Writing about sex altogether is tricky. But inexplicitness is best, except when it isn’t. Do remember, though, that it takes refinement to be gross. (Was Jacobson following his own advice in his book The Act of Love which preceded The Finkler Question? Publishers Weekly described it as a “naughtily erudite” novel in which he “explores the nature of the erotic” in which a character is found “letching after two underage girls while attending the funeral of a man whose wife he had seduced” and in which the main characters wife ’embraces the infidelity foisted on her with gusto, relishing her thrice-weekly assignations and, after much persuasion, titillating her curious husband with details of their intimacies.’? Doesn’t look like it.)

Don’t be upbeat or feel-good, and don’t invite your readers to find you or your characters incorrigible.

Assume you are writing a tragedy. If your novel is any good that’s precisely what it will turn out to be.

Don’t consent to be called a comic novelist. It’s a tautology.”

A lot of these pointers are things to avoid rather than to do, and Jacobson was almost certainly trying to be witty rather than offering a serious guide to writing a comic novel, but at the same time the tragic element of The Finkler Question is central to the narrative and one that I will return to.

The connection between Jacobson and Kingsley Amis is deeper than their both having won the Booker. In my view many of Jacobson’s works bear a strong resemblance to those of Amis senior. His leading male characters are generally irritable and world weary, with an internal monologue revealing someone kicking against the pricks. These characters frequently seem an avatar for the novelist themselves, revealing their frustrations with the modern world and women in particular, especially those who prove resistance to their late middle-aged charms. Amis was notoriously misogynistic, but there are similar traits in Jacobson’s work. In No More Mr Nice Guy for example, the wife of his central character writes “feministical-erotic novels” and in Redback, Jacobson’s third novel, misogyny is front and central. Both men also experimented with writing dystopian novels – The Alteration (Amis) and J (Jacobson).

What does it mean to be Jewish? More specifically what does it mean to be Jewish in the UK in this century? That is The Finkler Question.

Jacobson’s central character, Julian Treslove is mugged one night. He is convinced his attacker calls him a Jew during the attack. Though some of his friends are Jewish, Treslove is not. Following the attack he becomes increasingly obsessed with what being Jewish means, in this time and place. For Treslove this isn’t a religious quest but rather a cultural one. He wants to understand the intricacies and precise nature of British Jewish life.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

One of Treslove’s friends Libor Sevcik, is an elderly widower who was once a teacher specializing in Czech history. Treslove and Sam Finkler, the third member of the group, were two of his students. All of the book’s characters have complex identities – Sevcik had a second improbable career as a Hollywood gossip columnist. Finkler is a successful television personality and author. Treslove is a casual anti-Semite – despite having Jewish friends he really has no understanding of Jewish culture and thinks ““Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew — small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes.”

Treslove turns the word “Finkler” into a private synonym for “Jew” and begins to anatomise what he thinks as ‘Finkler’ behaviours, traits and customs, wondering to what extent he shares these characteristics.

Jacobson writes passionately about the Middle East through his complex characters. The New York Times’s review of the novel claims that the novel “does a painful, bravura job of presenting a full spectrum of Jewish attitudes about the Middle East”. Perhaps, although I don’t think Jacobson makes any serious attempt to underplay his own views:

“By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be constructed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked representative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries…”

This is that difficult beast, a deadly serious comic novel. Wry smiles are probably the most you will get in the way of comedy or amusement and the main characters are hard to love, but the insights into Jewish life in 21st Century Britain are important and make the novel worth reading in themselves. I doubt if any minds will have been changed by the analysis of the ‘Finkler’ question but that obviously was never really the point. In trying to be both amusing and serious the novel runs the risk, like all others of the genre, of being neither. I think it will be obvious by now that I am still not sure whether it succeeds or not – but that indecision is OK, I don’t pretend these reviews are final judgments on what I read. The 2.8 (out of 5) score on Goodreads from the 2,000+ reviews suggest I’m not the only one with mixed or indecisive feelings about it!

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, 2010

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Book review

The Child in Time by Ian McEwan, 1987

Some time back in an earlier post I mentioned George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. In that essay Orwell lists the many ways in which writers use ‘bad’ English, including ‘dying metaphors’:

“A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves…Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact.

Sketch of the face of a young child

The long-winded reason I have highlighted this quote is because Ian McEwan’s 1987 The Child in Time is very much a curate’s egg – and ‘a curate’s egg is a classic example of a dying albeit very specific metaphor which is invariably used incorrectly. Originally it meant ‘something that has good and bad parts’ but where the bad parts are so bad as to spoilt the overall effect’. Which would be the case where parts of an egg are bad. In other words the phrase is meant ironically – it suggests some parts of the egg (or whatever) are not bad, whereas in fact they are. So it’s quite a subtle phrase – far too subtle for some writers and speakers who adopt the phrase unthinkingly to mean ‘something with good and bad parts’. This usage is so widespread that many dictionaries have given up the struggle and now use the latter definition – so for example Wikipedia defines the phrase as

“something described as partly bad and partly good. In its original usage, it referred to something that is obviously and entirely bad, but is described out of politeness as nonetheless having good features that redeem it. This meaning has been largely supplanted by its less ironic modern usage”.

Stephen Lewis is a fairly archetypical McEwan central character. He is a children’s writer and aspiring novelist, recently and moderately happily married, with a three year old daughter, Kate. The puzzling success of his children’s stories distresses him as he wants to be considered a serious writer – which is the classic definition of a first world problem if ever there was one. I don’t know if we are supposed to empathise with Lewis about this problem, or laugh at him, but he soon has much more serious concerns. On a routine visit to the supermarket Kate goes missing. Is Kate the ‘child in time’? Perhaps. Kate’s disappearance is obviously deeply traumatic and Lewis devotes all his time and energy to trying to find her, with no success whatsoever. The police investigation fizzles out quickly, and media interest in the case moves on. The search places an unbearable strain on his marriage, which slowly collapses.

Principally as a distraction once his search is finally abandoned, Lewis joins a government committee on childcare. He has no particular interest in the details of the committee’s work, but it gets him out of the house. He spends the rest of his days lying on the sofa drinking scotch and watching mindless TV programmes. His wife, Julie has by now moved away to the countryside and become a recluse.

Stephen occasionally visits his close friend, Charles Darke, also on the childcare committee. Darke who was in charge of publishing Lewis’s first novel and is now a junior Minister in the Government, and a rumoured future Prime Ministerial candidate. Darke’s wife, Thelma, is a quantum physicist who engages Stephen with her outlandish theories on time and space. At the behest of Thelma, who believes Stephen’s marriage with Julie is salvageable, he makes an effort to reconnect with Julie by visiting her. Although he has never visited the remote town where she now lives, he feels strangely familiar with the place – especially a pub he passes on the way. There he experiences an event that he cannot explain: he sees his parents as a young couple in a pub, before they were married, an event they later confirmed to have happened. This supernatural experience remains unexplained, but obviously is linked to the ‘in time’ theme of the novel’s title. Though Julie and Stephen temporarily reconnect during his visit and sleep together, Kate’s absence has become too great a divider between them and they part believing it impossible to overcome her loss.

The childcare report is finally published. The Government intervenes and ensures the recommendations are changed to suit its political agenda, and although this interference is exposed the Government brazens it out and ignores the criticism. Who would have known that politics is a dirty business? These scenes in the novel manage to be both very contemporary given the current Government’s manoeuvring to avoid one of its members being suspended for example and at the same time quite dated – we are now a lot more cynical about these things.

In the meantime Darke and his wife abandon their lives in London for seclusion in the countryside. Prompted by a comic encounter with the Prime Minister, Stephen goes to visit and finds that Charles has regressed into a child-like state, a form of infantilism. Intellectually he seems unimpaired, but he is childish and uninterested in the outside world or his previous life and responsibilities. Perhaps Charles is the child in time?

The novel ends with a death and a birth, which seems an almost traditional way of concluding a story. But I started this review by explaining why I thought the novel’s central flaw spoiled the overall impact. If you are going to use the supernatural (or time travel if you prefer) as a plot mechanism, you are going to have to have a good reason for doing so. Whatever A Child in Time is, it is not magical realism where the laws of nature are optional extras. If you have a hyper-realistic novel (and if this is not a realistic novel then why should we care about Kate’s disappearance or the anguish it causes her parents?) then why does it need the magical appearance of time-travel to progress the story. It just felt utterly redundant and more than a bit silly, like a weak episode of Doctor Who.

The opening chapters of the novel in which Kate disappears are very powerful, but once she has gone it seems McEwan wasn’t sure what to do with the novel, and grafted on the Darke storyline with its fairly heavy-handed political commentary. The whole is much less than the sum of its parts. This is still relatively early McEwan, and I want to avoid saying it shows promise, because that is obviously hindsight talking, but it does. But if you are interested in exploring his novels this is definitely not where I would start. Atonement is obviously wonderful, but my personal favourites are Sweet Tooth, a superbly clever variation on the traditional spy novel, and the extraordinary, exquisite novella On Chesil Beach.

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