Author Archives: The Reading Bug

19th Century literature, Book review, Frankenstein, gothic fiction, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Mary Shelley

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1817

With 200 years of critical analysis weighing down on any critic or reviewer, what is one to do with a novel such as Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus? Trying to find new insight or interpretation is almost pointless. Such is the nature of the novel that it opens itself to an almost boundless variety of interpretations, on human relationships, sex and sexuality, or science and the modern world. That burden of scholarship can be oppressive and hamper the ability to say anything sensible or interesting about such a complex novel.


Let’s start at the beginning. The story of the novel’s genesis is well know, probably much better known than the novel itself. It did not come as a surprise to me, with the experience of reading Dracula last year, that the novel bears little or no relationship to its popular culture incarnation. Crucially, the monster is not an incoherent, stumbling beast, but a highly intelligent and articulate creature, albeit one which is monstrously ugly and extremely, dangerously strong. The sub-title of the novel, the Modern Prometheus, should not be overlooked. Wikipedia says that “Prometheus became a figure who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. In particular, he was regarded as embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy“. Quite. Is this then a straightforward anti-science parable – don’t meddle with nature because you will create a monster beyond your control? Certainly the anti-GM protagonists would support that reading. But simple readings of this kind, however attractive, are invariably over-simplistic and resisted by classic texts, and this is no exception. I suspect this is a bit of authorial mis-direction. The sub-title invites us to a simplistic don’t meddle with the unknown interpretation. Suspicion of science and where it might take us at the beginning of the 19th century was certainly understandable. For me the novel’s themes about parenthood and original sin are more interesting.

The narrative structure of the novel is the complex “Russian doll” approach much loved of 19th century novelists. To be honest this adds little to the story overall – you quickly forget you are reading a letter from the explorer who has met Frankenstein and is passing on his tale to his loved one, in much the same way you forget Wuthering Heights is told as a series of fireside gossipy chats from the ever present domestic servant to the new tenant of the neighbouring house. It is almost as if the truly omniscient narrator had yet to be accepted by authors or readers at this stage of the development of the novel, (which in the early 19th century was not quite so anachronistically named). The author appears to feel compelled to show the reader what happens by using increasingly artificial devices – someone claims to have observed what happened – rather than just tell the story. In this novel this is pushed to ridiculous extremes – so for example the monster lives for almost a year in a hovel adjoining the house occupied by the DeLacey family without their once wondering “I wonder who it is who lives next door?”. Dracula uses much the same technique, despite the almost 100 years between the two novels. Is this in homage to the early 19th century spirit of the novel?

John Sutherland’s book on puzzles in 19th century literature which I wrote about earlier this month has an interesting take on this novel, and in particular the question of how Frankenstein actually creates the monster. The author gives virtually no detail – there are glimpses of how he prepares, but the actual process itself is not described at all. Time and again Shelley uses the word “disgusting” to describe Victor’s reaction to his work. This could be a response to the body parts he is presumed to have used, but when he begins to create the monster’s partner later in the nvoel he does so in a remote Orkney croft-house with only his scientific equipment to hand, far from any mortuary or graveyard. Sutherland speculates a sexual component to Frankenstein’s disgust, which is a seductive interpretation. How does man create life, after all? This would go some way to making sense of the original sin theme of the novel – Frankenstein creates life, then rejects it, and reaps the consequences. All parents will have some sympathy with how he feels.

As a central character it is hard to warn to Frankenstein. He is a complete idiot – for example, despite the monster making it clear to him that he will make him suffer if he does not create him a partner, and that he will see him again on his wedding night, the penny does not drop that there might be a threat to his fiancee. He lives a life of considerable privilege, but wastes his energies and gifts on ultimately fruitless personal obsessions.  The monster is a more interesting character, although again his “no-one loves me so I am going to kill someone….Why does nobody love me?” wears thin fairly quickly.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many ways to read this complex novel. The one that appeals to me the most is that the monster is, like Mr Hyde, a product of his creator’s sub-conscious. Both doctors Jekyll and Frankenstein create monsters that run out of control and lead to their ultimate demise. Victor is arrested for the killing of Charval, and it is surprising that no-one suspects him of Elizabeth’s murder. Several people fear he is mad, and few other witnesses see the monster clearly. The sexual under-currents of the novel could also explain Victor’s terror of his wedding night. I appreciate I haven’t explored this idea in any depth, and no doubt there are scholarly articles and books out there which explain the idea far more coherently than I could ever do, but it is an interesting reading of the novel I think.

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Christmas books

Comment: Christmas Books – Various

Desperate times require desperate measures, and there are few so desperate as Christmas shoppers in the throes of a guilt induced buying frenzy. The Christmas book market caters for this community, and while I have no intention of reviewing my Christmas book consumption this holiday, for the record I have scanned the pages of:

Viz – The Bill-Poster’s Bucket – the toilet book par excellence, but not for the squeamish or prudish.

Pointless – 100 Pointless things – definitely the cream of the crop, (is that a dead metaphor by the way, or does it still bring to mind cream, or crops?) – it appears to have genuinely been written by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman from the TV show of the same name, and contains several moments of real wit. It recognises its own ephemeral nature in a good humoured way, and is not utterly disposable.

QI – 1,227 facts. Bends the meaning of the word “fact” to breaking point, and gives the impression of being thrown together – very little trouble has gone into this to make it anything other than a long list of the curious, gleaned from research for the programme. With each fact being a sentence or two long at most there is little to make the facts interesting, or even quite interesting. The value of the television programme lies in the patient explanation which comes with each question, rather than the bald fact itself.

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Is Heathcliff a Murderer? – Puzzles in 19th Century fiction by John Sutherland

This book is a series of 34 short and not quite so short essays looking at “anomalies, enigmas and mysteries” in 19th century fiction. The definition of “puzzle” is draw deliberately loosely. Some are genuine questions that would occur to any reader – how does Jane Eyre get Mr Rochester’s mysterious “celestial” message at the end of her novel? Others would not normally occur to an ordinary reader, particularly those in which the main concerns are timing. One does not normally worry too much about or even notice small anomalies in timings and obsessively working through all the time markers in a text to spot so called mistakes feels like a huge waste of time. (Othello is a great example of this – very few if any audience members and readers spot the parallel time schemes running through the play, which of course are anything other than accidental.)
Sutherland draws on his extensive knowledge of the most arcane and obscure of 19th century novels and the period in which they were written to answer some of his puzzles. Mesmerism, for example, is suggested as the answer to the Jane Eyre puzzle. This was a rich mine for Sutherland – “Can Jane Eyre be happy?”, and “Who Betrayed Elizabeth Bennett?” followed this book in due course, as well as a similar look at Shakespeare.
Obviously knowledge of the text (rather than a film of the text) is a useful prerequisite for enjoyment of each essay here, and as Sutherland fairly quickly moves from the novels that the average reader would be familiar with to ones that only students of 19th Century novels could hope to have heard of (“Is he Popenjoy?” anyone?) I found myself reading more to enjoy his scholarship and learn a little about the text and author, than to share the judgment on the particular puzzle in question.

Genuinely original insight into the core texts are of course elusive. These – Bleak House, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch – are some of the most studied works in literature. So it is in the margins that Sutherland finds some gems. In Bleak House the crossing sweeper Jo sweeps what exactly? Is it “dust”, an excuse for begging with no practical purpose, or is it excreta from the horses and humans of a crowded London? More controversially, what is the role of the slave trade in the prosperity of various families in Jane Austen’s novels? I particularly enjoyed the close reading of Frankenstein, soon to appear here, which looks at precisely how the good Dr creates his monster. In the absence of Hollywood’s lightning and hunchbacked servants, Sutherland deduces that there is a sexual component to the act of creation, which of course fits nicely with the creation myth reading of the novel.

I think I know why I enjoy this kind of literary sleuthing so much. In my blog entries the ones which I feel happiest about are the ones where I have from close reading and perhaps a bit of creativity come up with a new and different perspective on a novel – the parallel between A Casual Vacancy and A Christmas Carol for instance.

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Book review, Zombie

Shattered Hourglass – Day by Day Armageddon – J L Bourne

 Shattered Hourglass is the third in the Day by Day Armageddon series. Zombie novels are very much a niche genre, with carefully prescribed rules. The first novel in this series worked within these conventions, but took a fresh approach. Written in diary format from the perspective of a military man surviving the outbreak one day at a time, it had an immediacy and freshness that captured the horror of the situation. In the sequel the focus broadens, and we are given more information about the unfolding apocalypse. Shattered Hourglass takes the threads of the story from the end of the previous novel and throws them to the wind. The tight focus is lost with multiple storylines, but no central character to follow. Some diary entries are retained, but these are interspersed with traditional narratives.
Granted, the author could not just keep giving us yet another day of zombie apocalypse, so it was inevitable the focus would broaden to look at, for example, the source of the infection, how the military responds, etc. But the tight focus of the first novel is now expanded with any kind of control. Essentially the novel consists of long periods of travel without zombie encounters to provide any threat or interest, interspersed with people running around shooting zombies in the head, with occasional zombie brain smashing using alternative implements for variety. Innovative ways of killing zombies such as luring them into the Panama Canal are flirted with but then spurned for more shooting and slashing. The central, originally anonymous, character, gets lost in the crowds, and we stop identifying with him or caring about him.
 
So far this is just a descent to the ordinary, but then things get worse. First, the author’s right wing, pro-gun views intrude into the text. Normally I am reluctant to accept the “Character A thinks X, therefore Author A thinks X” argument without further evidence, but here the references are sufficiently heavy handed and inappropriate as to suggest the author is using the zombie apocalypse as an excuse to promote his own views. I have to say the argument that gun control, as well as leaving the good citizens of pro-gun control states exposed to gun-toting lunatics (rather than spawning them) would leave them equally exposed to flesh eating zombies is one of the more innovative and plainly laughable arguments I have come across in a long time.
 
This book was originally due to be published earlier this year, and the final publication date – 26th December – is just weird. The published version has traces of being hurriedly finished. The author runs multiple plot lines – far too many to manage effectively – but the spinning plates come crashing down in a badly mis-managed finale. Plot lines are shut down suddenly with little or no explanation, or in the case of the Hotel 23 outpost not at all. The aircraft carrier is overtaken by zombies without any coherent rationalisation beyond a hint that it has something to do with the children on the carrier exploring (great security there), but all is OK because they manage to crash into an island secured by a previously unmentioned citizen militia. The main plot line is concluded in even more of a hurry, with the deployment of a concrete spraying weapon that would not be out of place in Scooby Doo.
 
A huge disappointment. There is plenty of scope here for further sequels, but whether this author has the commitment or interest to deliver has got to be in doubt.

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Miscellany

Comment: Books I read in 2012 but did not blog about.

How very post-modern of me – a blog about things I didn’t blog about! The intention was always to write about what I read, but in 2012 I made a few exceptions – either I struggled to formulate anything coherent about the books, or er, …
Crime and Punishment. Yes I did really read this through to the bitter end, although it was something of a struggle. Why didn’t I blog about it? Some novels are just so monumental it is hard to find anything original or insightful to say. But that’s not the real reason if I am completely honest. At the heart of this novel is a shocking and brutal double murder shown through the eyes of the murderer. The reader is invited to empathise with the killer – not to condone their actions but to come to some sort of understanding of their behaviour, bizarre and erratic though it is. I didn’t, and I fully recognise that is a failure on my part. But without that understanding the rest of the novel is just so many words. The other relatively minor issue I had with this novel was the translation – it was heavy handed and cumbersome, which may have been true to the original text, I have no way of knowing, but make a tough read even tougher.
Oleanna – David Mamet. I read this very quickly earlier in 2012, so definitely need to revisit it in 2013. It is a highly fractured text – a lot of the speeches are one side of telephone conversations, or fast paced cross-purpose arguments, which on the page are almost unintelligible, but in performance I am sure would make a lot more sense. On my initial superficial reading I got the impression that the play condoned violence towards women, which I can’t believe for one minute is right (although I know the play on first publication was considered controversial) – so I definitely need to reread.
50 Literature Ideas you really need to know – John Sutherland. A text book really, but bite-sized introductions to a wide range of literature concepts such as Post-Modernism, Structuralism, Post-Colonialism, and a lot of other -isms. Text books aren’t really for reading, as any student will tell you, but for referring to in the course of that frenzied last few hours of revision. Sutherland works hard at making this all accessible, but there is only so far you can go with Deconstructionism without reducing it down to an alternative set of labels.
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Book review: Back Story – David Mitchell

Time was I would run a mile from a celebrity biography, with I think plenty of reason – there are so many clippings jobs with glossy front covers out there , that sorting the wheat from the cliche wasn’t usually worth the effort. Autobiographies ought to be better, but the majority are ghost-written with the minimum of effort – a few childhood anecdotes, prompted by photographs of minor parts in school plays and family holidays, progressing quickly to the break through appearance on Comic Relief/Big Brother/Help I’m a Celebrity etc. You can spot the filling and the difficult subjects avoided or glossed over a mile off.
In the spectrum of autobiographies, of which there was a huge surfeit this year, Back Story fits firmly in the middle of the pack. In its favour it is clearly not ghosted – Mitchell’s engaging personality shines through – and it is reasonably open and honest. The downside is that his career trajectory, arguably even his life, has been so predictable and routine – for a comedian that is – that you get the feeling you have read this all before, and more entertainingly.
To provide the book with a structure,other than the blindingly obvious chronological approach, which of course is in the end unavoidable, Mitchell takes a walk through north London, using the things he sees along the way to prompt a minor grumble about an aspect of modern life, followed by the appropriate reminiscence. This is a harmless enough conceit, but gets predictable very early on, and soon becomes unintentionly pedestrian (see what I did there?). It is obviously not his fault that his life has had little in the way of trauma or challenge, and he has made the most of the opportunities life has given him, but overall you have to wonder why he wrote this other than to cash in on his moment of celebrity.

If you want to get to know the real David Mitchell – and I am not sure why you would, his work doesn’t require it, and his comedy is funny irrespective of what school he went to – this is obviously a good starting place. I got the impression a few things were passed over quickly or omitted – most notably the name of the lover before his engagement to Victoria Coren. The section of the book on his relationship with Victoria is by far the most engaging, where the barriers come down the most and we see someone with a bit more than a dry wit and a comfortable life.

One quibble – Mitchell has a pop at Stewart Lee for a piece he does on Only Fools and Horses. You might have seen it – the scene where Del Boy falls through the bar was voted funniest moment on British TV in one of those made up polls that no-one ever really votes in. Lee used this vote as the basis for an extended and extremely funny rant. Mitchell objects to the points Lee makes in this rant, missing the point with considerable flair – Lee is being funny; it is a performance piece, not a political treatise. The irony is that rants about things that you really shouldn’t get upset about eg Tesco’s signs or grocers’ apostrophes are Mitchell’s trademark.

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21st century literature, J K Rowling, The casual Vacancy

Supplementary: The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling (2)

Of course, no sooner had I finished my previous blog than I googled “Rowling” and “Dickens” and established, conclusively, that there is no such thing as a new idea. In fact, the association between JKR and CD was established long before this novel, in, for example, interviews and comments by JKR herself. And there is the answer to the Christmas ghosts reference. Simply put, the reference to Dickens is there because JKR wants us to approach her dark novel of life in 21st century England in the same way we think of Dickens’ social commentary in his novels. Dickens did not have any simple solutions for the situations he found his characters in – neither does Rowling.

Drawing a link between yourself and one of the greatest English novelists is a bold step, and Rowling has a long way to go in terms of building her canon before any such parallels are justified – to be honest they are a bit ridiculous at this point in her literary career. You can’t argue with the impact of Potter, but however much it crossed over into adult readership, and however much it addresses serious themes, it remained a work of children’s literature. You have to admire her chutzpah though, and if you are going to adopt a role model you could do much worse than Dickens. Of course I am not suggesting Rowling is equating her work with CD, simply saying that she would like her novel to be thought of in the same way ie as serious social commentary.

Having said there is no such thing as a new idea, so far I have not found anyone online pointing out the echoes of Christmas Carol with this novel, so I am feeling a bit smug as of now.

One other thought about this novel – Rowling seems to experience a visceral disgust with fat people, men in particular. She attracted some flak in the Potter novels with this tendency, and built in positive overweight figures later on in the series to balance the impression given by the Dursleys and others. Here fat is strongly associated with nastiness, laziness, and corruption, and is described with a distaste bordering on disgust. A sympathetic character equates obesity with drug abuse, and while Character A says X therefore the author thinks X is obviously too simplistic for words, the insistence of her returning time after time to the observation that the fat middle class men in this book are unattractive and unpleasant really leaves an unavoidable impression that she equates obesity with moral weakness. Fat teenagers are one thing – fat middle aged people are just bad.

Last comment on this edition – what a bad, lazy cover!

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21st century literature, Book review, J K Rowling, The casual Vacancy

The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling

This is a bit of a trojan horse of a book – ostensibly about middle England’s parochial concerns about a vacancy on the parish council of a small town in the West Country, this novel actually addresses a wide range of social issues, from self harm, racism, prostitution, domestic violence, etc, etc. Its like an episode of the Archers on crack.

The litmus test, as always, is was it a good read? The change of style from the Hogwarts novels is dramatic, and takes time to adjust. We then have a large cast of broadly similar characters doing largely similar things. Sorting out who is who takes a while. The election, when it finally comes, is a damp squib (ha ha, Hogwarts joke there for you) and some of the more melodramatic plot twists are telegraphed some way off. So far so bad, but despite that I found myself turning pages interested in what happens next.

Rowling’s middle England is a bleak, dark place. There’s not one happy family – all the children seem to despise their parents, with good reason. Huge psychological neuroses are carried around on shoulders young and old. A doctor refuses to treat a heart attack patient. There is no love or affection that is fulfilled. The only glimmer of hope for this community dies in the first chapter.

This novel has attracted over 500 Amazon reviews, so the chances of me having much original to say about it are slim. It has been portrayed as a political attack on the middle class, sneeringly done by someone whose political roots and allegiances are with the council estate rather than the detached mansions she now inhabits. This is of course simplistic; Rowling has not rewritten Hard Times here. But the mention of Dickens leads me cunningly on to what I think might be an original point. In this novel the Parish Council website is hacked four times, by four different characters, and messages are posted on the sites comment forum by “the ghost of Barry Fairweather”. Note – “the ghost of BF”, not “BF’s ghost”. Four ghosts – ring any bells? I think there is a deliberate, subtle reference here to the four ghosts in A Christmas carol, including the three Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Is Robbie Weedon a Tiny Tim figure perhaps?

Why – just a coincidence, or is Rowling making a more subtle point about regret. There is no Scrooge-like redemption at the end of this novel, and I clearly can’t build much of a case for the reference – but I bet it is there somewhere.

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History, Ian Kershaw, The End: Germany 1944-45

The End: Germany, 1944-45 by Ian Kershaw

As readers we are as guilty as the rest of the media when it comes to our insatiable obsession with the second world war. We just keep returning to it, drawn irresistibly, by that haunting “what if?”. Here the focus is on the last year of the war in Europe (incidentally, it would have been nice if Kershaw had even acknowledged that there was a war going on elsewhere) and tries to answer the question – why did Germany fight on into 1945 when the end was only a matter of time, and when the cost was so high in terms of human life and destruction of property, including Germany’s cultural heritage.

Asked this question a non-historian would hazard that the Nazi party, its leadership, in particular Hitler, would have had something to do with it, and of course this is the case. So successful had the Nazi’s been in making themselves part of every aspect of German existence that the thought of giving up when their leaders where still promising victory was inconceivable. factor in the mythology of the stab in the back surrender of 1918 and the scene was set to a fanatical fight to the death. The detail of this is portrayed by this book – and it is fascinating to see how the administration managed to keep mundane activities running almost up to the end of the war. More chilling is the retribution meted out to anyone who tried to hasten the end of the war, or surrender, even with the Allies at the point of victory.

Kershaw makes very effective use of letters home and diaries, as well as other sources such as secretly recorded prisoners of war, to get nearer to the heart of what ordinary Germans really thought about the end of the war. The illusion of Hitler’s invulnerability was extremely strong.

There are a few things I would like to have seen covered in this book. Firstly, the war is portrayed as a European battlefield, and while the focus was on Germany I don’t see how the context of the World War could be ignored. Secondly, the war the conflict to the north and south of Germany is largely ignored, along with pretty much any other non-Germanic part of the conflict. As I understand it Germany had large reserves of forces in for example Norway which were never called into the final struggle for the homeland – why not, when old men and young boys were being pushed into uniform? Finally, we hear time and again that many Germans clung to the hope of some secret weapon that the Nazis were working on. We are led to believe that these were simply false hopes, rumours dreamt up by a desperate populace and allowed to spread by a propaganda machine running out of lies. But is that the whole story – was there really no German research into new weapons that could, potentially, have turned the course of the war?

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21st century literature, Alternative history, Book review, C J Sansom, Dominion

Dominion by C J Sansom

Alternative history novelists are a pretty unimaginative bunch – the Second World War is I suppose such a compelling period of history, when tiny moments can be seen to have had, in hindsight, such momentous impact, that they rarely stray far from its grasp. The turning point in this version of German victory in WW2 is Chamberlain’s resignation in 1940, and Halifax’s acceptance of the premiership. Surrender on terms to Germany swiftly follows.

So far so pedestrian, but Sansom sets his novel 12 years on, in a downtrodden England when the resistance is gaining momentum, Hitler is ailing, and the never ending war between Greater Germany and the USSR is draining the life out of the Reich. This world is realised in a lot of detail with alternative histories laid out for the rest of the world, the British political establishment (including Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, foreign secretary, and of course, irresistibly, Churchill, leader of the resistance) and various other British institutions.

What follows is a highly conventional spy narrative, with several strands closely interwoven, never more than a day or two apart. The principal character, David Fitzgerald, a fairly anonymous civil servant finds himself involved in a spy ring. By coincidence Frank Muncaster, a depressive university friend of his, becomes aware of some highly secret information which must not fall into German hands. This is all hugely unconvincing – it is never explained why the USA would want to try to smuggle Muncaster out of the UK when they already have the knowledge he carries. When the secret is finally revealed it is all one big “meh”, and the novel fizzles out of a beach in Rottingdean, of all places. For much of the novel this implausibility doesn’t really matter – Sansom drives the plot along convincingly and doesn’t allow too much time for reflection. The period detail, clearly the result of a lot of research, gives the book the feel of a 1950s black and white movie.

This was an undemanding, very long, read, that was an interesting digression on the “what if” theme, with a reassuring “we win the war in the end anyway” conclusion which I would not be at all surprised to see televised sooner or later.

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