Category Archives: Book review

Book review

Paradise by Toni Morrison, 1997

Paradise has a gripping opening:

They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here.

The rest of this complex, challenging novel is all about unpicking this first sentence – what has driven these men to attack these women? 

They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the convent, but there is time, and the day has just begun. They are nine. Over twice the number of the women, they are obliged to stampede or kill, and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement–rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, mace, and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns.”paradise

Readers of Morrison’s previous novels might be expecting the “they” in this opening paragraph to be white racists attacking a black community, perhaps in the civil rights period if not earlier. Any expectations of this kind are quickly confounded. It soon becomes clear that this is an exclusively black community brutally cleansing itself of the inhabitants of a troublesome women’s communal shelter.

Ruby, a town of some 360 souls, was founded as a refuge for its inhabitants, in recognition that black communities were always going to face racism from white neighbours and authorities. This retreat into isolation and seclusion followed a brief period after the civil war when some black community leaders rose to positions of prominence, only to be stripped of those roles as part of the removal of civil rights that in turn took many decades to restore. Ruby is a successor community to the earlier Haven, also a black-only town, intended (as the name implies) to create a place free from racism and prejudice. As part of the building of the community the founding fathers constructed a communal oven of brick and iron. This oven carries a heavy symbolic burden representing everything the people of Ruby have achieved. The name of the new town, originally “New Haven” derives from that of a young woman who died when she was refused medical attention because of her race. The town has no jail or cemetery because, it is claimed, it has never needed either, although this is what is known surely as tempting fate?

Anxiety about Ruby’s future comes to crystallise in concerns about the nearby “convent”, a refuge for women with nowhere else to go, a mirror image of the town.  The building sense of crisis comes to be crystallised around  plans to change the slogan on the Oven: though it now says only “… the Furrow of his Brow”, the town elders claim it used to say “Beware” at the beginning, whereas the younger generation wishes to make it “Be the Furrow of his Brow”. In parallel to learning the history of Ruby we learn the back-stories of the inhabitants of the ‘convent’, a mansion ominously designed like the cartridge of a gun. The description ‘convent’ is colloquial but incorrect – the house was originally a boarding school for native American girls until it closed and became the refuge of today. (In writing this post I am struggling with tense – “is” or “was” – this is at least in part because the narrative is so fluid in terms of time, jumping freely from decade to decade.) The tipping point in the troubled relationship between the town and the convent comes when some men in the town are scandalized when the Convent women make a rowdy appearance at a wedding between members of two of Ruby’s founding families. 

This is a classically “difficult” novel. There is little exposition – a sequence of point-of-view narrators tell their stories, explaining little and only slowly coming to the point at which their lives bring them to Ruby. Some things are never explained – for instance one character, Mavis, flees an abusive husband and family following the death by suffocation of her young twins. These deaths are almost too horrific for her to consider face-on, so we only get brief snippets of information about how they came to die or be killed, and about her culpability or otherwise for their deaths. The memories and reminiscences of the multiple narrators range freely over time, and it can often be hard to tell when and where the events being described happened. It’s a little like looking at a jigsaw before the pieces are assembled. If you read a traditional review of this novel it will normally try to pieces these pieces together for you, or at least join up the edges, and lay them before you in a sequential narrative – this happens, then this happens, etc. But reading the novel is obviously a very different experience – we find things out, if ever, when the author tells us, and it can be many pages between a scene or situation being described and us finding out what may have happened. This complexity is further compounded by the scale and ambition of the novel. There are dozens of characters involved in the narrative, and I defy any reader on a first reading to keep track of who they are and the complex web of family relationships between them. I can only assume that the author knew we would be unable to retain all this information on a first read. So is the experience of reading this novel intended to be muddled and unclear, or are we being invited to return for further readings?

I have written about complexity in novels many times before, such as here, and I should be clear and re-emphasise that complexity isn’t inherently either good or bad. I have tried to read books where the complexity was such I gave up, but that was my failure rather than that of the author. Complex books can be rewarding in ways that straightforward narratives are not, however frustrating they can be at the time. Which is a way of avoiding the question of whether the complex nature of Paradise makes it a rewarding read or not. Initially I couldn’t make my mind up, so I read some reviews.

The New York Times was pretty savage:

“Paradise” is everything that “Beloved” was not: it’s a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing, thoroughly lacking in the novelistic magic Ms. Morrison has wielded so effortlessly in the past. It’s a contrived, formulaic book that mechanically pits men against women, old against young, the past against the present.

Zoe Heller in the London Review of Books was less strident but still had serious reservations:

 At some point, all Morrison’s major novels seem to lose patience with the finicky business of recording moral blur, choosing to swerve off into the realm of moral fable and preacherly uplift. Often, as in Paradise, the change is marked by an onset of gloopily ‘miraculous’ events.

Adam Mars Jones in the Guardian agreed with the LRB’s concerns about the mysticism in the novel

If Morrison had resisted the temptation to bring in possession, ghosts and amateur miracles, Paradise might have attained the status of masterpiece. As it is, reading the book is too often like standing next to someone with a pair of powerful binoculars trained on a distant view. From her impassioned commentary on what is going on you long to share her vision, but when she passes the binoculars across, the focus wheel is missing or jammed.

This is a novel that confounds readers’ expectations. It is not an easy read, and I am not yet convinced that the complexity works in the way it does in, for example, the work of William Faulkner, of which I kept getting strong echoes throughout the novel. I can certainly understand the reservations of the reviewers quoted here, that frustration with a novel that never fully comes into focus.

It would be wrong of me to close this post without paying tribute to the author who died last month aged 88. Her life was one of remarkable achievement, culminating in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 2012 she was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2016 she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She was unquestionably a giant of American literature, and through her work provided a way for America to come to terms, at least in a small way, with its past.

 

Standard
Book review

Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake, 1959

This is sometimes a worthwhile exercise – try to imagine what it would have been like to read a novel such as Titus Alone when it was first published. Titus Groan and Gormenghast had been published in 1946 and 1950 respectively, and while the narrative had come to a natural close for many of the characters, Titus’s story is set to continue. You have waited nine long years (almost as long as those waiting for the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire) and finally Mervyn Peake’s sequel is published, picking up almost exactly at the point Gormenghast finished nine years earlier.TA2

But it confounds all expectations. Instead of being another static story set in Gormenghast, it is free roaming. Instead of being set in a quasi-medieval world without mechanisation, it shockingly takes place in a world in which cars and aeroplanes appear, and seem to have existed all along outside the hermetic world of the castle. The novel is as hard to categorise in genre terms as its predecessors, but it is unsettlingly different. 

Unsurprisingly the critical reaction when Titus Alone was published was confused. This was compounded by the editorial decisions made at the time. It was not until several years later that a subsequent editor, reviewing Peake’s original manuscript, noticed serious discrepancies between it and the published version. The original editor had butchered the text, making a bewildering number of unnecessary changes. In its restored form the novel proved far better than critics originally supposed. (Incidentally I wonder if the editor or publisher of the Penguin Modern Classics edition illustrated below had read the novel, because while the drawing of Irma Prunesquallor is a wonderful example of Peake’s draughtmanship, she doesn’t appear in the novel.) 

What readers at the time would not have known is that Peake was in the first stages of the Parkinsonism which would eventually take his life. This undoubtedly had an impact on the text – it could account for some of the surreal elements of the narrative, the comparative lack of structure, and the profound difference between this novel and its predecessors. But what it doesn’t do is make it a bad novel. (Incidentally I can only think of one other example – Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown – of a novel written by a dying author where their condition shows on the page. Other authors died part way through the completion of the text, but their illness doesn’t show through. Edwin Drood for example could have been written by Dickens at pretty much anytime during his career, I would argue.)Irma

Titus Alone follows Titus in self-imposed exile from his hereditary prison. Traveling through a wasteland he comes to a mysterious city where he encounters two faceless, silent figures – police officers? –  who want to take him into custody, or worse. He is rescued and befriended by zoo-owner Muzzlehatch, and goes on to explore his new surroundings. A series of disjointed and surreal incidents and adventures follow. There is a Kafkaesque feel to this narrative – Titus is constantly menaced by ill-defined threats, and never feels fully safe, even when Juno, Muzzlehatch’s former lover, agrees to be his guardian and takes him to live with her.

They become lovers, but it can’t last – Titus has a restlessness that compels him to keep moving. He is followed by a mysterious floating orb which he smashes with his piece of Gormenghast flint (his only token of home). The dark adventures continue culminating in an intense scene of destruction which is some of the most intense writing I think I have ever read. It’s certainly impossible to do it justice in a synopsis. The novel’s conclusion has haunted me for years. Escaping the city Titus wanders the wasteland alone for months, until he comes across a outcrop of rock that he recognises from his childhood. Hearing the guns of Gormenghast saluting the missing Earl, he knows he is home. But that knowledge is enough.

If Peake had only written Titus Alone we would of course judge the novel differently, rather than it always being assessed by its differences to its predecessors. It is less claustrophobic and faster paced than the previous two novels, more disjointed and in many ways lighter. Titus is lost without the structure of life in the castle, and bemused by the menace of the wider world, and many readers will share his post-Gormenghast reaction.

Titus Alone is in the words of one blogger “a jewel that possesses more facets than Titus Groan and Gormenghast yet will be elusive to some readers precisely for that reason”. Extremely well put.  It’s also worth looking out Michael Moorcock’s comments on Titus in the introduction to a recent edition from which I have borrowed the information above about the novel’s editorial history. Moorcock knew the Peakes at the time the novel was being written, and has some interesting observations on the creative process involved and the novel’s place in 1950’s Britain.

Titus Alone was Peake’s attempt to take his character and method out of the hermetic world he had created in Gormenghast and Titus Groan and make it confront not only issues of identity, time and human interaction but the problems of modernity and even post‐modernity — the world as it emerged from terrible, unprecedented conflict, confronting the Cold War, nuclear weapons and new forms of authoritarian dictatorship springing up like weeds from the ruins of the old world. In following this path Peake recognized the limitations of the form he had developed with such genius and was consciously seeking a means by which he could expand it to expose his protagonist to the 20th century.

There are certain books you will always love, no matter whatever else you read, and to which you will always return; these three novels would be my desert island choice. They are of such scope and ambition that they reward many, many rereadings. Together they represent an extraordinary achievement and I cannot recommend them highly enough.

 

Standard
Book review

Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake, 1950

The second novel in the series, Gormenghast picks up where Titus Groan left off, returning to the castle where the new earl, 77th of his line, grows up in his vast crumbling demesne into a life governed by strict and stifling ritual. Peake reintroduces his cast of extraordinary characters in a leisurely manner – he is in no rush to get the action underway. Titus, who had just turned one when the first novel ended, has to grow up before he can confront the demons that threaten him. 

The florid language that characterised Titus Groan also returns, not least in the descriptions of the castle itself:

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river.

Readers will either luxuriate in prose like this, or be irritated by it. I don’t think one can have Gormenghast the adventure story without Gormenghast the prose poem, and I am very glad we have both.

Once the scene is set, and the characters are re-introduced, Peake can spend time on showing Titus’s childhood. He is wonderful at capturing the joy as well as the boredom of infancy: in a phrase that has stayed with me since reading it some 40 or more years ago, Titus is wading through his childhood. 

Or to put it another way

Drear ritual turned its wheel. The ferment of the heart, within these walls, was mocked by every length of sleeping shadow. The passions, no greater than candle flames, flickered in Time’s yawn, for Gormenghast, huge and adumbrate, out-crumbles all. The summer was heavy with a kind of soft grey-blue weight in the sky – yet not in the sky, for it was as if there were no sky, but only air, an impalpable grey-blue substance, drugged with the weight of its own heat and hue. 

Titus begins to chafe at the crippling conventions of castle life and the impositions of the daily rituals he has to undertake. I always read these rituals as Peake’s commentary on the meaningless conventions we surround ourselves with in life. Yes, this novel is thought provoking as well.

Sooner or later an Earl needs to go to school, and here Peake introduces new characters to his cast: the Professors. Professor Bellgrove is elevated to the headmastership following a fatal and grotesque accident which disposes of his predecessor. The other teachers are, as one by now expects, a collection of grotesques, not one of whom should be within a mile of a classroom. Peake is in no hurry with the adventure element of his tale, and introduces a new element to his narrative – romance, albeit a comedy romance between lovers who are getting on in years. The angular spinster Irma Prunesquallor, sister of the castle’s doctor, decides to get married, and throws a party to help her secure a groom from among the eligible teachers of the castle. Bellgrove rises to the occasion and begins to pay her court:

“His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride?”

I have an immense fondness for the chapters featuring the professors – they add little if anything to the plot, but they flesh out the world of Gormenghast wonderfully.

Meanwhile Steerpike, now assistant to the Master of Ritual, Barquentine, watches and waits for his opportunity. He decides that Barquentine stands in his way of advancement and has to be disposed of. However the plan doesn’t go smoothly – Barquentine puts up an unexpectedly fierce fight. Steerpike is severely injured, suffering extensive burns and almost drowning. As he lies recovering his delirious mutterings give rise to concerns in Dr Prunesquallor’s mind that he was involved in the mysterious disappearance and presumed deaths of Titus’s aunts, the twin sisters Ladies Cora and Clarice. Steerpike is now under suspicion, and from this point the novel races to a tragic and bitter conclusion in a chase scene that repays any and all the patience the reader has invested up to this point. An epic manhunt through the rapidly flooding castle ends with Titus having to make the most difficult decision of his young life.

I’ve praised Peake’s use of language, his character creation, his descriptive powers, but really at the heart of this novel is an adventure story. It takes a while to get there but the payoff at the end is extraordinarily exciting.

The question is, however, what happens next?

Standard
Book review

Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake, 1946

God I loved this book and its sequels. They enchanted me in a way that very few other books have done in my lifetime – possibly only teenagers can really feel this way about novels. Decades on I can look at them a bit more dispassionately and see their (very minor) flaws, but they remain high on my top ten list, and will always do so. It’s not going to be easy explaining this obsession. You either love these books (or at least the first two, the third is more complicated as I will explain in a bit) or you don’t – indifference is rare.

Peake was a writer of extraordinary flair and confidence. This is how he opens Titus Groan:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping arch, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

I wonder at the assurance and skill of an author who can open with a parenthesis like that. This is our introduction to the huge castle of Gormenghast, a “vast landscape of crumbling towers and ivy-filled quadrangles” that has for centuries been the hereditary residence of the Groan family. I have only limited evidence for this but I am personally convinced that as Peake wrote the novels the castle grew in his imagination, starting from a modest, realistic setting and with it finally ending larger than a city. Titus Groan, the first of the series (not strictly a trilogy as it was not conceived as such, more a 3 book series) opens in an extraordinarily cinematic way – taking the reader from the outside of the castle where the Bright Carvers reside to the Hall of Bright Carvings, through corridors and passageways into the heart of the castle, focussing down to a small eye-hole in a painting through which we see the novel’s newly born hero, Titus, heir to the crumbling towers of Gormenghast.

Slowly Peake introduces the cast of his drama. Lord Sepulchrave, seventy-sixth Earl of Groan, a melancholy man, a prisoner of the rituals that govern life in the castle.

Sepulchrave, 76th Earl to the house of Gormenghast and lord of those tracts of country that stretch on every hand, in the North to the wastelands, in the south to the grey salt marshes, in the East to the quicksands and the tideless sea, and in the West to knuckles of endless rock.

His wife Countess Gertrude shuts herself away with her birds and her multitude of white cats. Their daughter is 15-year-old Fuchsia.

a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair. She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich – her eyes smouldered.”

Fuchsia is a typical teenager, moody, self-absorbed and selfish. Sequestered in the south wing of the castle are Sepulchrave’s identical twin sisters Cora and Clarice:

dressed in purple, with gold buckles at their throats by way of brooches, and another gold buckle each at the end of hatpins which they wore through their grey hair in order apparently to match their brooches. Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected.

Both suffered from ill-defined fits in their youth which left them with limited mobility and even less intelligence. They crave power and blame Gertrude for robbing them of their rightful place in the castle’s heirarchy.

This is the ruling Groan family. Their lives are supported by numerous servants. These include Mr Flay, Lord Sepulchrave’s personal assistant, who is obsessively dedicated to his master. Swelter, the castle’s enormously fat chef, is Flay’s arch-nemesis:

Swelter, as soon as he saw who it was, stopped dead, and across his face little billows of flesh ran swiftly here and there until, as though they had determined to adhere to the same impulse, they swept up into both oceans of soft cheek, leaving between them a vacuum, a gaping segment like a slice cut from a melon. It was horrible. It was as though nature had lost control. As though the smile, as a concept, as a manifestation of pleasure, had been a mistake, for here on the face of Swelter the idea had been abused.”

Nanny Slagg is the down-trodden Groan family carer, looking after Fuchsia and now Titus. Doctor Prunesquallor is the castle’s physician. Rottcodd cares for the Bright Carvings. Sourdust is the Master of Ritual.

Into this arcane, decaying, isolated world, comes Steerpike, a young kitchen boy who could give Machiavelli a run for his money, Rescued by Flay from the kitchen, mainly to irritate Swelter, Steerpike immediately starts scheming his rise to power. This is as much his story as Titus’s. Steerpike is the worm in the apple of Gormenghast, who slowly comes to corrupt the whole body-politic of the castle.

In some ways the castle itself is almost a character in the novel. Peake is endlessly fascinated by its eccentric architectural detail:

Most of these buildings had about them the rough-hewn and oppressive weight of masonry that characterized the main volume of Gormenghast, although they varied considerably in every other way, one having at its summit an enormous stone carving of a lion’s head which held between its jaws the limp corpse of a man on whose body was chiseled the words: “he was an enemy of Groan’; alongside this structure was a rectangular area of some length entirely filled with pillars set so closely together that it was difficult for a man to squeeze between them.

Some readers have struggled to allocate Titus Groan and its sequel to a particular genre. While often described as fantasy, there are no witches, dragons or magical spells here, nothing supernatural or other-worldly at all. We perhaps cannot tell where or when Gormenghast is, but the people who live there obey strictly the internal rules of the narrative. It is best read as a gothic adventure story, a romance. Yes it is peopled by grotesques who you are unlikely to meet in everyday – but you might. There are stranger people out there. Not that long ago the Guardian carried an article comparing the novel to its near contemporary The Lord of the Rings, trying to understand why it was not as well known or loved as Tolkien’s trilogy. This was surely a category error – one work is a quest trilogy peopled by dragons, dwarves, wizards and elves; in Titus we remain rooted in Gormenghast, and the only menacing creatures hiding in the shadows are the men and women of the castle.

Readers may struggle with Peake’s florid language. Without question some passages are over-written. The novel also has probably the slowest start of any classic – it takes an age to reach Titus’s birth and Steerpike’s escape from the kitchen. All I can say is that once you get past this point the pace picks up and the narrative is gripping across the two main novels. Steerpike is a compelling character – while he is clearly monstrous, we cannot help but sympathise with him for at least some of his journey.

Titus Groan and its sequels are wonderful, life-changing, superb novels. Peake creates memorable characters you come to genuinely care about, and who will stay with you. There is a Shakespearean quality to the tragedy that unfolds in this novel and its sequel, a tragedy compounded in a remarkable way by the turn of events in Peake’s own life that are reflected in the third and final novel in the series. They may not be universally popular – some readers may find it hard to find a hero to identify with, and the language over-indulgent – but I love them.

Standard
Book review

Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan, 2019

Let’s start with that clever title.  The ambiguity lies between machines that are similar to ‘me’ and machines that feel a form of affection towards ‘me’. In Ian McEwan’s interesting latest novel it’s not clear in what sense if any the machines in question, robots, like the narrator.McEwan1

The narrative is relatively straightforward. Charlie Friend, the narrator, buys one of the earliest personal robots introduced onto the market. These robots are all called either Adam or Eve. His Adam is a very near simulacrum of a human being, although it costs more than the price of an average house (and Charlie still lives in a flat in London). Charlie is attracted to Miranda, his upstairs neighbour , and they soon begin a relationship. This quickly becomes a menage a trois, as Adam first has sex with, then falls in love with, Miranda. Yes, they are that kind of fully-functioning robot.

Charlie, Miranda and Adam are living in an alternate version of the 1980s, one where Alan Turing didn’t take the course of chemical castration ordered by the courts following his conviction for being gay. Turing is the key in this parallel universe to unlocking an extraordinary leap forward in technology in which self-driving cars are commonplace and robot technology has been perfected.

During my reading of Machines Like Me I kept experiencing a nagging sensation that something wasn’t quite right. Unquestionably the novel’s narrator wasn’t telling us the whole story, and I wondered whether there might be a hidden reason for this, in a similar fashion to McEwan’s earlier Sweet Tooth. In Sweet Tooth there are similar moments where things don’t quite add up, where the narrator is clearly getting things wrong or asking us to make intuitive leaps without sufficient reason. There is the same feel to the narrative here – the narrator presents us with a series of events which successively feel ‘wrong’, and asks us to take them at face value.

The sense that Charlie’s account is either misleading or disguising another, perhaps more serious or disturbing narrative, recurs throughout the novel. Things don’t quite add up. Early on Adam tells Charlie that Miranda, at that point only his potential girlfriend, is likely to hurt him. Charlie doesn’t follow this up – surely he would take the earliest possible opportunity to grill Adam on what he means, but he lets it slide, and apparently forgets about the warning, such is the strength of his attraction. The much later explanation of this warning is insufficient. Shortly after this incident Adam breaks Charlie’s wrist when he attempts to turn him off, a clear violation of Asimov’s first law which had been specifically referenced a little earlier in the novel. (1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Adam also ignores rule 2. (a robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law) freely throughout the novel – he is almost completely autonomous. After the attack, Adam threatens Charlie with the removal of his arm, which Charlie assumes is a joke, although he has little reason for doing – at any time this comment would be unfunny, but coming as it does just after he has broken his wrist, it is clearly a serious threat.

Charlie earns money speculating on the stock exchange. It takes him forever to work out that Adam, with his far superior if not god-like intelligence, might be a little bit better at this than he is. Once he sets him to work he quickly amasses thousands of pounds. While Adam’s intelligence is special, it isn’t unique. If he is able to manipulate the stock and commodities exchanges to swiftly earn thousands, is there any reason to think that others with access to this technology would not have had the same idea, and be using computers to make their trades? Of course they had that idea a long time ago, so the narrative as presented by Charlie loses another element of its credibility.

I thought we were edging towards a revelation during the scene when Charlie is taken for the robot and Adam for the human by Miranda’s father, during a much-delayed visit. Adam easily passes this version of the Turing test, but the mistake is unconvincing – while Charlie is dull, and his small talk is similar to that of an android, it would have been funnier if the mistake had been a deliberate put down by the prospective father-in-law. Was this scene hinting that Charlie is actually the android with implanted memories and Adam the human owner? Or that androids have now assumed their rightful place in ascendancy over man, and this is the method of control, fooling humans that they are the owners, while being in control all along (and therefore able to override the Asimov rules?

But sadly nothing ever come of this line of thought, and it turns out that Charlie isn’t a seriously flawed narrator after all. All the inconsistencies and “off” moments were just lapses in the construction of the narrative, nothing else. Which was a major disappointment.

Some of McEwan’s recent novels, I am thinking of Solar and The Children Act in particular, were weighted down by the extensive research behind them. There was a sense that McEwan had gone to a considerable effort to learn about the topic in question, and was reluctant to let it go to waste, so incorporated large chunks of his notes into the text. Sometimes it felt like I was being lectured and that a test was likely at some point. Machines Like Me has a similar feel – the life of Alan Turing is definitely fascinating but if I wanted to read a biography of the man I would have done so.

McEwan has some fun with the setting and the alternative history in which Britain loses the Falklands War and Tony Benn becomes Prime Minister, but it is hard to see the relevance other than providing a context for and explanation of the advances in technology. There is no real effort to flesh out this world in any detail – apart from the life-like robots and the self driving cars, everything else is familiar, down to the poll-tax riots and the Brighton bomb. It’s just the 1980’s with robots.

I’ve been quite harsh on Machines Like Me thus far, but I did enjoy reading it. I wanted to know what happened to the characters, and while Miranda never really came into focus, I was pleased she earned her happy ending. As a mediation on human consciousness and identity, I didn’t feel the novel had anything new to say – Never Let Me Go is an incomparably more interesting and engaging exploration of many of the same issues.

Standard
Book review

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, 1985

The popularity of the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale may have been what inspired Margaret Atwood to return to Gilead and the story of the eponymous handmaid Offred. (In the TV adaptation this character is called June, but so far as I can tell this name is not used in the book). It was certainly a factor in my decision to finally getting round to picking up this much-admired classic.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set the near future. A radical religious group, the “Sons of Jacob”, has captured power in the United States. The president has been assassinated, congress murdered, the constitution suspended, and the possession of jobs and separate bank accounts is forbidden to women. This is only the beginning of a dramatic overhaul of society in which all other religious groups are banned and a Talibanesque Old Testament-inspired model of society is imposed.

Declining birth rates caused by pollution and radiation mean that now only a few women are able to have children. These women are taken into slavery and forced to produce children for the ruling class of men, the “Commanders”. They are known as handmaids, a title derived from the story in Genesis of Rachel and her slave Bilhah. Women (and their children) are commonly treated as possessions in the Old Testament, and this inspires many of the new social structures and traditions in Gilead. All women have rigidly defined roles and and must follow a strict dress code: Commanders’ wives wear blue, handmaids red, and Marthas (servants) green.

The story is narrated by Offred, a 33 year old woman who records several months of her life as handmaid to a Commander and his embittered wife. As well as telling the reader about her imprisonment and the daily tortures she faces, she includes memories of her life before and during the revolution, which she describes as “The other time, the time before”. Life is brutal for almost everyone in Gilead, but the enslavement of women and the ritualised assaults for the purpose of breeding is particularly horrifying, even if Offred has slow begun to come to terms with her captivity. Her fond memories of times past provide some slight relief from the brutality of her new life.

Things improves marginally when the Commander begins to meet her secretly at night, not for sex, but to play Scrabble. This surprising development lightens the mood slightly and allows them to develop a less formal relationship. This is rule-breaking that could easily end badly for Offred, but she welcomes the hint of freedom it offers. She also agrees when the Commander’s wife, Serena, proposes that she tries to get pregnant by Nick, the family chauffeur, the implication being that the Commander may be sterile. At the same time Offred learns from her shopping partner, Ofglen, that there may be an underground resistance working to overthrow Gilead.

Offred’s narrative ends abruptly, leaving it unclear whether she has been taken into custody for her small acts of resistance, or whether she escapes Gilead. A mis-judged epilogue set in 2195 explains the events of the novel were recorded onto cassette tapes and are now considered an historic document charting the early years of the Republic of Gilead. While it appears a more equal society has now been restored, the lecturer is insensitive, treating the victims of the regime as a source for clumsy jokes. 

There are several disturbing aspects to this novel. It is utterly convincing in its demonstration how the injustices towards women in today’s society came to be the first step towards their enslavement in Gilead. Offred describes her life before the collapse of society as largely happy, but

“I never ran at night, and in the daytime only beside well-frequented roads. Women were not protected then. I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out, but that every woman knew: don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, or at night.”

In other words the seeds of Gilead and its oppression of women are inherent in today’s society. Another incident recounted in the novel emphasised this point. Offred describes a book-burning scene. But these are not nazis burning books about Marxism, but women burning hard core porn.

“You see what things used to be like? That’s what they thought of women then!”

I think the author may be suggesting here that freedom of speech extends to even content we find offensive, and that once we start burning books or magazines because they are upsetting, we are on the path that lead to censorship. Atwood in other words is out to challenge the reader rather than present a scary story which we can walk away from knowing we are lucky not to live there.

There are some obvious parallels between The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984. Both are set in a relatively near future in which people can remember and contrast life under the previous regime. Both envisage totalitarian control of society in which thought crime can be punished by death. Sex is strictly controlled by society and is used as an act of rebellion by the protagonists. War dominates daily life in both Gilead and Eurasia. The state spies on and tortures its opponents and punishes any deviation from the rules, and uses collective gathering, such as the daily hate or the Salvagings to keep the people in check. The novels even share the same feature of an epilogue or postscript looking back at the society from a more liberal future. The other characteristic the novels share is their approach to language. In 1984 language is under attack through the introduction of Newspeak, constantly being diminished to reduce the risk of thoughtcrime. In Gilead they take this further, so all writing and reading is forbidden to women (which is why seemingly mundane invitation to play Scrabble is so dangerous thrilling to Offred).

Doing a small amount of background reading I came across the shocking fact that this novel was short-listed but did not win the 1986 Booker prize, which was instead awarded to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. Time has not been kind to that decision. I know hindsight is a wonderful thing but the judges of that award must look back with some shame. Instead of the Booker the Handmaid’s Tale won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award in 1987, even though the novel is clearly not science fiction. My other brief attempt at research also threw up (choice of words intentional) this classic example of missing the point. Writing in the Spectator, the writer Allison Pearson claimed

“I only wish that Atwood would tell her fans that she is not writing, primarily at least, about the way that Trump’s America could go in the future, but about how things are right now for females in repressive Islamic societies. We are so blessed compared to them. To don a red dress and white bonnet, to pretend their suffering is ours, to talk of tyranny, is the most appalling moral vanity.”

Yes and no. Surely Atwood is writing about how women are treated in patriarchal society, not just one country or set of social conditions. She is unlikely to have been writing about Trump’s presidency in 1985 anyway! It’s easy to scan round the world, find a society you don’t like (the Spectator isn’t a fan of Islam) and identify ways in which women in that society are treated similar to those in Gilead. You can if you wish do the same for women in America denied the right to have an abortion. It’s not a competition – which society is the most repressive towards women – the problem is that they all are. And they all use the same reasons – that women are not safe when they are free. I think this slowly dawns on Pearson, because she ends on this peroration

“Imagine a country where women have no jobs, no rights and are valued only for their reproductive success. Imagine a country where girls aren’t taught to read in case they get ideas. Imagine a country where boys eat lunch while girls have to wait. Imagine women having to cover themselves head to toe in case men get ideas. Sadly, we don’t have to imagine. There are millions of handmaids. The nightmare of Gilead is right here.

Her dislike of Islam overrides her need for consistency, because women wear head to toe clothing in many societies including the UK, women earn less than men, women face everyday sexism in the workplace, and the example of boys eating their lunch first is drawn for a reference earlier in the article to a school in the UK.

I am glad Atwood has returned to Gilead in The Testaments, which I look forward to reading. The Chaucerian echo in this novel’s title always suggested there were more tales to be told.

 

Standard
Book review

Interesting Times, (Discworld 17) by Terry Pratchett, 1994

Interesting Times, as well as being 17th in the Discworld series, is also the fifth novel to feature the world’s worst wizard, (or should that be wizzard?), Rincewind. So, cards on the table time – despite the enormous respect I have for all things Discworld, Rincewind is one of my least favourite characters. My heart sank a little when I read that this was another Rincewind novel (the fifth). I think there’s a good reason why after making several valiant attempts to resurrect him, Pratchett eventually allowed Rincewind to quietly fade into the background of Discworld.

‘May you live in interesting times’ is commonly thought to be an old curse (don’t we live in them right now?) usually attributed to the Chinese, although wrongly so according to my extensive research (Wikipedia). The phrase provides the inspiration for this adventure in which Rincewind travels to the Agatean Empire, the mysterious continent from which Twoflower, the naive but very rich tourist in The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, came. 

After Pratchett’s traditional framing introduction, the novel opens with the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork receiving a demand from the Agatean Empire to send them a great wizzard. The spelling mistake triggers the idea of sending them Rincewind. Of course this immediately leads to a series of disasters and mishaps from which he always emerges through sheer dumb luck.

The villain of Interesting Times is Lord Hong, a Machiavellian character who has read Twoflower’s book, What I did on my holiday which has inspired vague ambitions to conquer distant Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett’s record on villains is patchy, and Lord Hong doesn’t linger long in the memory – he is a bit of a cardboard-cutout psychopath. Cohen the Barbarian also makes a reappearance, accompanied by a Silver Horde of aging barbarian berserkers. Together with a new “Red Army” of young idealists and Rincewind’s trademark failures at magic, they capture the imperial palace, and with it the Empire. Lord Hong rallies the Empire’s armies, and the scene is set for an epic battle – six aging barbarians and an ex-teacher against 70,000 trained soldiers. What could possibly go wrong?

There are several fairly serious issues with Interesting Times. First, the jokes aren’t that funny. There’s always a high groan quotient in the Discworld novels, but the problem here is repetition. The Silver Horde are old, but really good at fighting. People who under-estimate them usually don’t live to regret it. If that joke is repeated once it is repeated a dozen or more times. Rincewind is a rubbish wizard and a coward, who will run away from danger at any opportunity, but is also a great survivor. Again, point made and repeated over and over again. The word intercourse is funny. Maybe once, but that’s enough.

And then there’s the rape ‘jokes’. The Silver Horde are barbarians, and rape women. Now they are old this is probably not going to happen, but it won’t stop them trying. I know the 1990’s were different times, but it was not funny then, and is certainly not funny now. Terry Pratchett was usually fairly progressive in his values (take for instance the ideas about religion in Small Gods), but this is a horrible mis-step. Am I being pious to find the opening scene – in which castaway Rincewind encounters several buxom Amazons who beg him to help them repopulate their race after a strange and highly specific plague has mysteriously wiped out all their menfolk – both boringly unoriginal and offensive? While I am being offended I may as well throw in the fact that much of the novel is culturally insensitive to the point of racism – Chinese/Asian people are portrayed as inherently funny – they speak strangely, eat weird food, misunderstand things, and are generally different to the citizens of old Ankh-Morpork.

About three quarters of the way through Interesting Times I was thoroughly fed-up – disappointed and un-entertained. And then something strange happened – I started to be engaged. I think I can pinpoint precisely the moment this happened – when it dawns on the Silver Horde that they may not win their battle (even though they quickly recover and offer surrender terms to the army) and begin to come to terms with their mortality – sooner or later all heroes die. There is a poignant scene where Cohen lists all his barbarian horde friends, and is told disbelievingly one by one that they have died, or worse retired into respectability. Old men don’t fear death, but they don’t welcome it either, especially not old heroes who have spent their life avoiding it. Pratchett doubles-down at this point by revealing the tragic back story to Twoflower’s loss of his wife, which is handled with dignity. Pratchett always was at his best when writing about Death.

So Interesting Times isn’t bad, but it hasn’t aged well, and could probably have been about half as long and not suffered. Rincewind fans will enjoy it, but there are few of the great quotable quotes that you can trip over elsewhere in the series. It’s not as thought-provoking or as funny as most other novels in the series, and Rincewind is as un-engaging as ever. Thank goodness the next novel in the series, Maskerade, sees the return of the wonderful witches!

Standard
Book review

Call for the Dead by John le Carre, 1961

Call for the Dead is the first novel in which George Smiley appears, which of course is the right order in which to read a novel series, not jumping straight in with the last one as I carelessly did recently. Carre

The novel opens with the suicide of civil servant Samuel Fennan following a routine security check, which in turn had been prompted by an anonymous accusation that Fennan had been leaking secrets to/working for the Russians. This is the novel’s central puzzle – why would Fennan kill himself when the review was going to clear him? But kill himself he has, and it begins to look as if the investigating officer, one George Smiley, is going to be blamed for his death.

This is the first of the novel’s many improbabilities – despite it being obvious that there is at least a chance that Smiley is going to be implicated in the suicide, he is asked to investigate it. He interviews Fennan’s wife Elsa in her home. While there he answers the telephone, expecting the call to be for him, (oh for the days before mobiles!) but it is an alarm call from the telephone exchange which Fennan had booked the night before. Why would someone book a call and then kill themselves? Could it possibly be that this is not a suicide, but a murder staged to look like one? It could.

A local policeman Inspector Mendel, the classic copper only days from retirement, conducting the investigation into the Fennan case, begins to work with Smiley. Smiley’s boss (rather late in the day) orders him to drop the case, but a letter posted by Fennan the night before arrives, requesting an urgent meeting that day, confirming his suspicion this is murder! Smiley hands in his badge to pursue the case. Of course these may not have been such tired police procedural cliches in the 1960’s, but that is of limited consolation to a modern reader.

Can you guess what happens next? I suspect you can. Yes, before he can make much progress with the case, Smiley is hit on the back of the head in an alley by a mysterious assailant, and goes out like a light. He has just had time to find the lead that will crack the case, and expose the sinister East German agent who is behind it all.

Yes, there’s a twist, of sorts, but by now you will have got there already. So why does this novel seem so tired and predictable when Le Carre is widely seen as a master of his craft, writer of novels of byzantine complexity where you only find out what really happened on the last page? The Guardian ran an excellent parody of the novel a while back which does a good job of pointing out its combination of cliche, predictability, and improbability. As soon as the long holidays to Austria the Fennan’s took every year (in an era when even everyday civil servants were prohibited from travelling to Eastern Europe) it is obvious they are guilty as hell. There is no way Smiley or anyone would have cleared Fennan on the basis of the cursory chat that passes for an investigation into the allegations against him. As well as being the first Smiley novel this was also Le Carre’s first novel of any kind, and it went on to generate a series that is widely loved and respected, so I shouldn’t be too harsh. Smiley himself is an anti-hero, fat, balding, aging, but becomes over time a formidable spymaster, not that you would necessarily know that from this work alone. I may have ruined my enjoyment of the later books in the series by reading the last one first, but at least I can say I have given Le Carre a run for his (my) money!

Standard
Book review

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell, 1936

Gordon Comstock, anti-hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is a failed poet, struggling with a premature mid-life crisis, and what we would now characterise as depression. He expresses his feelings as resentment at demands placed upon him by family and friends, and rages against the need to work for a living. OrwellRejecting a well-paid job in advertising, which he feels is beneath him, he instead works in a bookshop, spending long sad weeks struggling to make sure he can afford the next cigarette or pint of beer. He obsesses over the cost of everything. At first this is slightly comic, but the intensity of this obsession soon becomes wearisome. He is a misanthropic, grumpy figure who doesn’t deserve the friendship and love of those around him who care for him and look out for him, even though he goes out of his way to reject their help.

He lives a mean life in a dingy bedsit in Hampstead, working in a bookshop and in his spare time picking away at his magnum opus ‘London Pleasures’. His fantasy of himself as a poet is fed by the earlier publication of a slim volume of poetry – ‘Mice’ – which sold only 153 copies despite positive reviews. His obsession with money poisons his relationship with his girlfriend Rosemary. They have nowhere to go to be together, and Gordon’s pride means he wont allow her to pay for even a cup of coffee. Rosemary suggest a day in the countryside , with a hint that this might be the long awaited opportunity to finally consummate their relationship (Orwell was to return to this idea – of a couple travelling out into the countryside to find somewhere private to have sex – in 1984).

The day doesn’t go well – in an attempt to impress Rosemary, he wastes most of his money on lunch at a fancy hotel. Later when they are about to have sex en plein air it doesn’t happen because Gordon has forgotten to bring any contraception. Like a spoilt child he is angry with her:

“Money again, you see! … You say you ‘can’t’ have a baby. … You mean you daren’t; because you’d lose your job and I’ve got no money and all of us would starve.”

When some money does finally come his way, in the form of payment for a poem sent speculatively to an American magazine, Gordon wastes it on a fancy dinner and ostentatious tips. He gets completely out-of-control drunk, leading to a night in the cells and the sack from his job the next morning. I am not sure if Orwell intended this episode to be comic, but it is quite the opposite, not least in the assault on Rosemary.

After “sponging” for a while off Ravelston, a more prosperous literary friend, Gordon secures a post in another book shop/lending library. Determined to sink to the lowest level of society but afraid of sleeping on the street, Gordon takes an even seedier bed-sit in Lambeth, (to have fallen so low!) and isolates himself from family and friends. There is no question at this point that Gordon is clinically depressed, and he is hugely lucky to be loved by some of the most patient people on the planet. In desperation Rosemary has sex with him, and while this doesn’t jolt him from his depression, the result of this and thereby the conclusion to the novel is predictable.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying has a strong, semi-biographical flavour. It was written in 1934 and 1935 when Orwell was living in London, and clearly draws on his experiences in this period. There are numerous points of comparison between the life of the novel’s protagonist and his own. Orwell had written for The Adelphi, a left-wing literary journal edited by Sir Richard Rees, an obvious model for Ravelston, Comstock’s upper-class publisher and friend. Orwell had also worked in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, lived in squalid bedsits and struggled to find female companionship while attempting to write.

The novel has not aged well. Many of the social attitudes here will be uncomfortable to a modern reader. Comstock is homophobic, referring to a customer as a “nancy”. Orwell gives this character an affected lisp, and used similar language in correspondence and articles, so it is a reasonable assumption that he is here reflecting the everyday prejudice against homosexuality that was common in the 1930’s. Comstock also has disrespectful attitudes towards women, seeming only interested in them for sex:

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can’t cut it right out, or at least be like the animals—minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hen’s backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come too near his food.

Equally there is a horrible disdain for the working class in this novel that only someone born in the middle-class (and having been to Eton) could display. Of course one needs to be careful to not ascribe the character’s views to the author too easily, but the disgust with which the working classes – not least their terrible smelliness – seems authentic, and is on a par with some of Orwell’s other work. Take this description of a pub for example:

“A foul yet coldish air enveloped them. It was a filthy, smoky room, low-ceilinged, with a sawdusted floor and plain deal tables ringed by generations of beer pots. In the corner were four monstrous women with breasts the size of melons.” 

Comstock explores the underworld of the very poor, as Orwell himself did when Down and Out in Paris and London, but is always an outsider looking in, with the safety net of the £4 a week job waiting for him whenever he wants it. There’s a cursory discussion of socialist ideas which could help Comstock escape the money he feels trapped by, but Orwell’s heart doesn’t seem in it. Gordon’s conversations with Ravelston never progress beyond the level of point facile scoring:

Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.

Whatever its aspirations this isn’t a novel of ideas. It is at best part of the tapestry of 20th century literature. The portrait of the profoundly grumpy, sexist poet with a flair for getting extremely drunk may have been an inspiration for Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, although there equally are some clear signs of borrowing from Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt about a another individual’s struggle against the pressures of capitalism. “Keep the aspidistra flying!” is also the final line of Henry Miller’s novel Nexus (1959), and last but least it provided the title (if little else by way of inspiration) for Nancy Mitford’s 1949 “Love in a Cold Climate“.

Orwell wrote Keep the Aspidistra as a source of relatively easy income, and it shows. In a 1946 letter to a friend he wrote that this novel was one of the two or three books of which he was ashamed, saying that it was “written simply as an exercise; I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money [-] At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.” It wasn’t until towards the end of his life, after the second world war, that he was to find his authentic voice as an  author of novels. Much of his best writing is to be found elsewhere, in his journalism, his essays and book reviews. 

Post script 2026 – I just came across this American edition of KAF on the internet, and thought I would share it as it is so marvellous:

May be an image of text that says "KEEP THE "The most powerful 35c novel he (0rwell) ASPIDISTRA has produced" LOS ANGELES TIMES FLYING GEORGE ORWELL Complete and Unabridged AN EXCITING AND MEMORABLE NOVEL THE THEWORI WOR AMOUS AUTHOR OF "1984" AND "BURMESE DAYS"

Standard
Book review

Collected Short Stories, by E. M. Forster, 1947

Having recently broken my short story review duck, I decided to read another collection, this time by the Edwardian modernist E. M. Forster. This edition, available as a Penguin 20th Century classic, is a good introduction to Forster, because it so clearly demonstrates what is wrong with his work, avoiding the need (if you are lucky enough to start here) to go on and read the novels.

The problem is essentially one of perspective. All of these stories, and I think this comment also applies to many if not all of the novels, are written from the narrow upper-middle class point of view from which Forster is never able to move away, no matter how he tries. All his point of view characters are to a greater or lesser extent prosperous, never seem to have to work, have servants or paid companions, and can afford long, indulgent if apparently unenjoyable journeys across southern Europe. Working class people and foreigners do appear in Forster, but the world is never seen from their perspective, and to be blunt they always seem two-dimensional participants.

Forster does, to be fair, consistently side with the people who are polite and condescending to these “others”. In novels such as Howards End and Where Angels Fear to Tread this extends as far as being able to contemplate relationships across class and national divides, but these relationships almost always end in tragedy or violence. Howard Bast is murdered, (Howards End) Gino loses his wife and baby (Where Angels) and Dr Aziz (Passage to India) has his life ruined by the false accusations made against him. Here the Greek family who are kind to Mr Lucas in The Road from Colonus are wiped out in a freak accident the day he moves on.

I don’t know whether Forster was unable to see the world through the eyes of the people who obviously fascinated and attracted him, or simply chose to write about what he knew. The relentlessness of yet another group of fussy English people settling into yet another picturesque Southern European town, with its hotels, its funny foreigners, the stereotypical alpha-male trying to assert himself by speaking English loudly, the older women, often in pairs, fussy about their luggage, eventually becomes wearisome.

Forster kept his sexuality a well-guarded secret in his lifetime, refusing to publish Maurice until after his death, but the homo-erotic gaze is also apparent here, not least in The Story of the Siren where a young Italian diver entrances the narrator:

“With a jerk he became alive, seizing my arm and saying “…I will show you something beautiful”….He drew me away from the light till I was standing on the tiny beach of sand…there he left me with his clothes…for a moment he stood naked in the brilliant sun…the man is past all description. His effect was that of a silver statue.”

(I’ve edited some text here to emphasis the point. Quite why he needs to be naked to go diving to recover a book, which surely would have floated anyway (thus avoiding the need for the naked diving) is unclear.)

These stories differ from the novels in one important way, and that is in their handling of the supernatural. In the introduction to the 1947 edition Forster describes them as “fantasies”. An element of the other-worldly is introduced in most tales. In some it is creatures such as Pan, fauns or sirens; in others it is the afterlife – one character goes to heaven, finds it boring, and leaves. Another character escapes from a boorish fiance by becoming a tree. At some points these injections of fantasy seem largely whimsical, and to this reader at least a little nauseatingly so. Elsewhere the allegorical nature of the tale is more obvious. In The Other Side of the Hedge for example, life is described in Bunyanesque terms as a walk beside a hedge, on one side of which is a hard-paced race with no obvious end in sight, and on the other an Elysian paradise of fields and recreation.

The Story of a Panic, the first story in the collection, demonstrate many of the inherent problem in Forster’s use of the fantasy genre. It is a silly melodramatic story about a sulky teenage boy, Eustace, (possibly the inspiration for Eustace Scrubb?) who one day, while on a walk in the ubiquitous Italian countryside, is possessed by the spirit of Pan. Instead of narrating the story in a way that is at least marginally sympathetic to the child, giving us some insight into what happens to him, Forster narrates the tale through the eyes of an older English tourist, who insists on being addressed formally, and looks sneeringly down on the Italians working in the hotel.  This strange little mis-firing tale establishes the template for many of the other stories in the collection, where essentially the same mystical experience is predictably repeated using the same set of characters and features. The tiresome and repetitive nature of these motifs almost became too much for me by the end of the collection, to the point where I didn’t want to read on because a) I knew what was coming, and b) I felt patronised by it. The most interesting story in the collection, The Machine Stops, which I reviewed earlier this year, is an exception to the fantasy genre, and is all the more refreshing for it.

 

 

 

 

 

Standard