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Book review

Eric, by Terry Pratchett, (Discworld 9) 1990

Eric, the ninth Discworld novel, was originally published as a Discworld story to distinguish it from its predecessors in the series. It came in a large format with illustrations throughout by Pratchett’s then cover illustrator, Josh Kirby.eric

This is going to make me hugely unpopular with Pratchett fans everywhere, but I have never been a big fan of Kirby’s work on the Discworld covers. For a start the emphasis seems always on under-dressed young women in various states of peril. If this was done tongue in cheek then he might have got away with it now and again, but the covers are essentially childish, and the books are not. I think this didn’t help Pratchett get the recognition his work deserved, and although a new illustrator took over when Kirby died in 2001, by then a lot of the damage had been done. Brandon Sanderson once famously wrote of STP (in an essay which described the Discworld novels as “the highest form of literature on the planet” which even I think it a bit of a stretch) that

“I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to discover Terry Pratchett. I avoided him during much of my early reading career”.

Could it be that Sanderson was put off by the covers perhaps?

(Incidentally, since writing this I have also found this quote from Sir Terry himself on LSpace.org, The Annotated Pratchett file:

The next UK paperback reprint of TCOM (they do a couple a year) will not have a Kirby cover. This is an experiment — there’s been feedback to me and to Transworld that suggests there are a large number of potential DW readers out there who think they don’t like fantasy and don’t get past the Kirby covers.”

Well there you have it.)

Anyway, Eric is now available widely without the art work, as are all the Discworld novels, so each to his own. Eric is a gently humorous retelling of the story of Faust, as the front cover of most editions with the word Faust struck through and replaced by the word Eric leaves little doubt about. It’s part of the continuing adventures of Rincewind, the original Discworld hero, who we left trapped in the Dungeon Dimensions at the end of Sourcery.

Rincewind is summoned out of these dimensions by a teenage demonologist, Eric, who like all teenagers wants to meet the most beautiful woman in the world, live forever, etc. Rincewind is compelled to play the part of the world’s least convincing demon, although strangely he does seem to have powers to fulfil Eric’s wishes. A very unfunny parrot provides a form of chorus as they travel to Klatch, followed shortly behind by the luggage, to Troy, or the Discworld equivalent Tsort, and finally Hell. There’s a ‘doing it by numbers’ feel to the plot, closely following as it does the source story, with only glimpses of the humour and thoughtfulness that characterises a typical Discworld novel. After they escape from Hell – of course – and go on their way, the story pretty much peters out rather than ending with any satisfying conclusion.

Normally I am falling over quotes to use in a post about a Discworld novel – with Eric that’s more of a challenge. For example:

“What’re quantum mechanics?”

“I don’t know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.”

just isn’t that funny, is it, let alone telling us something essential about life as the best STP quotes often do. Or take this below-par use of the word ‘horology’, I hesitate to call it a pun, which only Eric would be amused by:

“The Tezuman priests have a sophisticated calendar and an advanced horology,” quoted Rincewind.
“Ah,” said Eric, “Good.”
“No,” said Rincewind patiently. “It means time measurement.”

“Oh.”

I am not going to labour the point, this was a bit of a dud, and I am going to move swiftly on to the wonders of some of later novels.

 

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Book review

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, 2017

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When Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Booker prize, much of the media coverage focused on the apparent ‘difficulty of the novel’, probably encouraged by Saunders’s interviews on the topic. In fact the novel is wonderfully accessible, once the reader has adapted to the slightly unusual narrative technique.

The novel has many different narrators – by one count over 160 – and it cuts quickly between these different voices. On the page it is presented like this:

An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.
hans vollman

This was highly irregular. It was after hours; the front gate would be locked.
the reverend everly thomas

The boy had been delivered only that day. That is to say, the man had most likely been here –
roger bevins iii

Quite recently.
hans vollman

As you can see, the author has helpfully indicated which character is speaking, which is normally fine – I found myself quickly adapting to this technique, which seems a commonsense way of avoiding the “he said, she said” reporting of conversation which can be dull. Often it is not particularly important which character is narrating, because the three above act largely as a kind of chorus to the action, finishing one another’s sentences, as here, but when it matters it is simple enough to check. Less frequent narrators are usually given distinctive voices, speech patterns, or language. Note incidentally that it is virtually impossible to describe this approach without using the language of the spoken word – voice, speech, speaking, etc. This is because these sections of the novel are effectively a script. If the text was written this way it would not be a cause for comment or seen in any way as difficult:

Hans Vollman: “An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.”

The reverend Everly Thomas: “This was highly irregular. It was after hours; the front gate would be locked.”

Roger Bevins III: “The boy had been delivered only that day. That is to say, the man had most likely been here.”

Lincoln in the Bardo takes as its inspiration the death from typhoid of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, in 1862, as the civil war was beginning to take a toll on both sides. In his grief Lincoln visited the crypt where his son was interred. Saunders cuts between historical details of the event taken from what appears to have been a lot of research with a much stranger story in which Willie’s spirit is received by the ghosts of the cemetery, who in turn reveal their own personal accounts of how they died. “Bardo” is apparently the Tibetan Buddhist name for a form of purgatory, a transition period between death and rebirth which is where these ghosts choose to remain, mostly refusing to accept the fact of their deaths.

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Abraham and Willie

They instead believe themselves to be injured, but with a chance of exiting their “sick-boxes” (a euphemism for coffins) and returning to their former lives. They argue that as they are able to think and feel, they cannot be dead, although the word itself is scrupulously avoided. The principal narrators, quoted above, are Hans Vollman, who longs to return to his unconsummated marriage, forever cursed him with a freakishly engorged member, Roger Bevins iii, ashamed of his gay feelings, who cut his wrists only to change his mind moments too late, and Reverend Thomas, hiding in the Bardo from the threat of eternal damnation, and trying to find in his memories the reason for his fall.

The arrival of young Willie provides a distraction from the eternity of waiting they face, as they struggle to persuade him to move on. He is reluctant to do so because of his grieving father’s visits. Saunders builds a compelling portrait of these and the other inhabitants of the bardo, a cast of desperate, sad, lonely and disturbed “survivors” refusing to accept the fact of their own deaths, under regular siege from recruiters – angels or demons – from the next world. Many of the ghosts are hideously deformed with physical representations of their moral failings or the worries that tie them to the world of the living: for example a miser is “compelled to float horizontally, like a human compass needle, the top of his head facing in the direction of whichever of his properties he found himself most worried about at the moment”. These sections of the novel are often disturbing – the idea of death as something that can be ignored by strength of will alone is not in itself original, but the troubled lives of so many of Saunders’s characters are sometimes not easy to read. The portrait of Lincoln, a devastated father trying to continue his burdensome duties as President, is convincing, and strikes a different tone from the strangely light, almost comic scenes in the cemetery. Lincoln comes to see his bereavement as the price he must pay for committing his country to a war in which so many other sons and fathers were to die.

I can see why this novel won the Booker, although I confess I have not read any of the other short-listed candidates. This was a £1 charity shop buy of a near immaculate copy – someone obviously wasn’t that impressed – which always makes the read that little bit sweeter!

 

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Book review

We Have Always lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, 1962

I’m trying to read more authors I haven’t read before. Shirley Jackson is a writer I have heard about mainly through references to her chilling short story, The Lottery. As I understand it, The Lottery is widely read in American schools, although it is much less well known in the UK. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Jackson’s final novel, published three

we have always

years before her death, and tells the story of two sisters, Mary Katherine (Merricat) and Constance Blackwood, who live with their aging and infirm uncle Julian in their isolated home in New England. The Blackwoods were and are a prosperous family. They remain aloof from the common people of the village and make them walk around their property to reach the main road rather than allowing them a short cut across their estate. This creates tension between the villagers and the Blackwoods, tension which turns ugly later in the novel.

Merricat narrates the tale, and it is clear from the opening that this is not a normal family:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

Older sister Constance never ventures further than the garden in the grounds of the family home. We soon learn why – she was tried and acquitted of murdering her family by poisoning their sugar bowl. Although sometimes described as a mystery, it doesn’t take Holmesian powers of deduction to work out who the real poisoner is – the character with the morbid obsession with death, who has sadistic fantasies about the people of the village who taunt her on her twice weekly shopping trips:

“I am walking on their bodies”

“I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die”

“I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all… lying there crying with the pain and dying”.

Merricat is a troubled young woman. She uses a primitive, childish form of witchcraft to protect her family, marking the boundary of their property with fetishes and totems. She is consumed with harmful thoughts and haunted by OCD rituals. At this point in the story Constance’s mental health, in particular her agoraphobia, appears to be recovering. She welcomes visitors and talks of going down to the village. Merricat feels threatened by this change, but this is nothing compared to her reaction when Cousin Charles, clearly more interested in the contents of the Blackwood family safe than the sisters themselves, comes to visit. Merricat’s murderous fantasies become even more vivid :

I wanted to stamp on him after he was dead, and see him lying dead on the grass.”

“I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. I could bury him in the hole where my box of silver dollars had been so safe until he came; if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.”

Charles’s arrival disturbs the delicate equilibrium of the house and Merricat’s mental health, and things quickly deteriorate. As Merricat desperately tries to drive him away she starts a fire which goes on to destroy much of the house, transforming it into the castle of the novel’s title, with an upper floor open to the elements like battlements. Uncle Julian dies in the fire and Charles flees. Merricat and Constance make a home in the ruins of their house, and this is where the story eventually leaves them, hidden from the rest of the world but finally accepted by the villagers.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a troubling tale which leaves the reader with many questions. Why did Constance not find her psychopathic sister the help that she so obviously needs? Why did no-one in the village work out the fairly simple puzzle about the identity of the family’s killer? How are the sisters going to survive in their ruins?

Merricat is an absorbing portrait of mental illness – but is We Have Always more than that? Does it have anything to say about American society, and about the way it treats outsiders? Merricat’s narrative voice is powerful, and can easily distract the reader into thinking that her account of the novel’s events, flawed though it is, is authentic, rather than seen through the distorting lens of her mental illness. We never get to know what precipitated her murderous attack on her family, but it is safe to say it was probably something trivial that lead to her being sent to her room that day. She certainly doesn’t see herself as a mass murderer; in many ways she is still a child, without any understanding of the consequences of her actions. She starts the fire that destroys their home, and although the volunteer firemen of the village put it out, saving the ground floor, they then go on to trash the house.

While the novel ends on a happy-ever-after note for Merricat and Constance, we can tell that their isolated way of life will not last long. Is this a parable for American society, that has survived the chaos and destruction of the second world war, but is living on borrowed time?

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Book review

Patronising Bastards, by Quentin Letts, 2017

Quentin Letts is a sketchwriter for the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper characterised by two predominant emotions- fear and hatred.  (The Mail is frightened of, and therefore hates, difference and change. It hates foreigners, the EU, the BBC, socialists, liberals, remainers, health and safety, and political correctness. It loathes Jeremy Corbyn. So it is hardly surprising that this rambling collection of short essays is dominated by hatred of the above.

Letts had a modest amount of success with an earlier book, 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, and this is just more of the same – a series of sketches loosely connected by the theme of people whom Letts finds patronising, although ‘people I disagree with” would be a more accurate summary. His targets range far and wide, and there is a random feel to attacks that span Nicholas Serota, Bob Shennan, an obscure radio programmer who had the temerity to move one of Letts’ favourite programmes, Richard Branson, Ian McEwan, Sandi Toksvig and Sir Ivan Rogers. No, I hadn’t hear of him either.

It is entirely understandable that Letts would use hyperbole as his go-to technique. Part of the problem with this book as he really doesn’t have any other way of approaching his subjects – the people he writes about are all mean patronising bastards, and there’s little if any light and shade in his portraits.

Personal insults abound. Obama is described as “feted mainly for being black” which is openly racist as far as I am concerned, Camila Batmanghelidjh is described as “that” (ditto, and sexist for good measure), Dame Judi Murray is a “great cow walrus“, and so on. Dame Vivienne Westwood must really have upset Letts at some point, because he is appalled when she revealed that she went commando to Buckingham Palace one time, saying “Sorry about the swarm of bluebottles, your Maj“. Yes, that’s right isn’t it Quentin, women’s genitals attract flies don’t they? Elsewhere she is “gurning termagant“. He describes Sandi Toksvig and “Sir Sandi” and Gary Lineker as “Dame Gary”. See what he did there – deliberately confused their gender to make fun of them. Hold my sides.

One of the persistent characteristics of Brexiteers is their tendency to portray themselves as outsiders, anti-establishment figures campaigning for the little man. Letts doesn’t really fit that bill (neither does Nigel Farage of course). He has written for The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and The Times, amongst others. He was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, Bellarmine College, Kentucky (now Bellarmine University), Trinity College, Dublin, and then studied Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1982–86) at Jesus College, Cambridge, taking a Diploma in Classical Archaeology. Quite the outsider!

Given all this it was a bit disturbing when I found myself agreeing with one of Letts’ observations on the cultural significance of Church of England hymns. It wasn’t a particularly political point, but he writes well on the importance of hymns in our cultural history and collective experience. The essay itself is spoiled by the tantrum that someone had the temerity to move his favourite programme – an arguable decision perhaps, but a long leap from patronising bastardy.

It’s always good to read books and writers you disagree with, I would be the first to accept that. As a left-leaning, remain-voting, blog-writing southerner I need to better understand why people voted remain, (although I still struggle to improve on Stewart Lee’s take on the situation. I can’t link it here because it is nsfw but google it). Did I come through the ordeal of reading Patronising Bastards with a better understanding of that perspective? Sadly no, because the level of personal abuse clouded almost any effort at constructing a coherent argument. Which was a pity, because 17.2m people can’t all be racists?

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Book review

Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne, 1873

Around the World in Eighty Days charts the adventures of Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout as they travel, well, you know what they get up to, and even if you didn’t the novel’s title would probably help you out! Set in the 1870’s, the time of its serial publication, the story takes its inspiration from the recent verneopening of the American transcontinental rail route, which theoretically allowed a journey around the world by land and sea in a time span that in earlier years would have been thought impossible. This is the central concept of the novel, which was obviously original and engaging in its day, although it hasn’t aged well.

Fogg is a caricature of the typically bloodless Englishman (there is a debate about the extent to which Verne established the various features of the Englishman abroad caricature, but that feels like a more academic exercise than I have the appetite for), only interested in his wager and his whist. He largely ignores all the countries he passes through. Passepartout on the other hand is fascinated by all he sees, and gives the reader some interesting insights into the countries they fleetingly visit. The pressures of keeping up to Fogg’s strict timetable give the novel a great pace, but means the countries fly by relentlessly.

I found Fogg’s lack of interest in his journey strangely off-putting – even when he meets an exotic Indian princess and rescues her from a grisly fate he treats her like someone he shares a commute with. Verne defines him largely by negatives:

Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas Fogg was a Londoner. He was never seen on ‘Change, nor at the Bank, nor in the counting-rooms of the “City”; no ships ever came into London docks of which he was the owner; he had no public employment; he had never been entered at any of the Inns of Court, either at the Temple, or Lincoln’s Inn, or Gray’s Inn; nor had his voice ever resounded in the Court of Chancery, or in the Exchequer, or the Queen’s Bench, or the Ecclesiastical Courts. He certainly was not a manufacturer; nor was he a merchant or a gentleman farmer. His name was strange to the scientific and learned societies, and he never was known to take part in the sage deliberations of the Royal Institution or the London Institution, the Artisan’s Association, or the Institution of Arts and Sciences.

Fogg is well-named, unremarkable in his appearance and his character. He possesses a self control that is alien to his European assistant and most of the people he meets on his journey. He is described as being:

“about forty years of age, with fine, handsome features, and a tall, well-shaped figure; his hair and whiskers were light, his forehead compact and unwrinkled, his face rather pale, his teeth magnificent. His countenance possessed in the highest degree what physiognomists call “repose in action,” a quality of those who act rather than talk. Calm and phlegmatic, with a clear eye … exactitude personified. … He was so exact that he was never in a hurry, was always ready, and was economical alike of his steps and his motions. He never took one step too many, and always went to his destination by the shortest cut; he made no superfluous gestures, and was never seen to be moved or agitated. He was the most deliberate person in the world, yet always reached his destination at the exact moment.

I am not sure if the reader is supposed to admire or warm to Fogg – we hope he wins his bet, although that’s never in much doubt, even at the close, but his romance with the Indian princess is a matter of supreme indifference.

Passepartout on the other hand is a larger-than-life comic character, constantly getting into schoolboyish ‘scrapes’, although the ease and regularity with which he is extricated from these situations gives the story a lack of authenticity. He introduces himself thus:

“Jean Passepartout, a surname which has clung to me because I have a natural aptness for going out of one business into another. I believe I’m honest, monsieur, but, to be outspoken, I’ve had several trades. I’ve been an itinerant singer, a circus-rider, when I used to vault like Leotard, and dance on a rope like Blondin. Then I got to be a professor of gymnastics, so as to make better use of my talents; and then I was a sergeant fireman at Paris, and assisted at many a big fire. But I quitted France five years ago, and, wishing to taste the sweets of domestic life, took service as a valet here in England.”

Fix, the bumbling policeman pursuing Fogg in the mistaken belief that he is a bank robber, is intended to provide further comedy as well as undermining Fogg’s attempts to keep to time, but we are never under any illusion that the outcome of the wager has been decided long ago. No matter what obstacles Verne throws in the way of the travellers, we always know they are going to waltz right round them and make it to the doorstep of the Reform Club with a minute to spare.

Around the World in Eighty Days is a confident expression of the wonders of the technological innovations of the 19th century and the way they were opening up the world to travellers. Instead of being scared by the inventions and machines (pace Wells) Verne revels in their powers. The novel is a celebration of the European spirit of conquest, exploration and innovation. Obviously we can now see the darker side to that spirit, but Verne sees things only from the perspective of his European characters and is blithely unaware that they are exploiting the people and places they visit. The novel also marks the beginning of long distance travel as something accessible to people other than explorers.  

Although Verne is usually seen as a science-fiction writer, this is a good example of an author writing outside his usual genre. There is a strong emphasis on the events and places in the novel being rooted in the actual, an attempt to make everything feel real and believable – hence for example the obsession with train timetables throughout the book. Now we can circle the globe in hours it all feels a bit quaint and ridiculous, and a wasted opportunity to see the world rather than just rush around it.

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Book review

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, by Carson McCullers,1951

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is a quirky, unusual novella set in the Southern USA in the (I am guessing here) 1930’s. Miss Amelia Evans runs a small store in a town in the middle of nowhere, topping up her income with sales from her whisky still. One day a stranger arrives in town, the catalyst for many a story. The visitor is a hunchback who claims to be Amelia’s distant Cousin Lymon. Acting out of character Amelia takes him into her home, and they form an unlikely friendship and partnership. Under Cousin Lymon’s influence, the shop transforms into the café of the story’s title.Sad cafe.jpg

Miss Amelia was once briefly married to Marvin Macy, a local troublemaker. The fact that the marriage never worked and was over in ten days was probably due to the fact that Amelia clearly never intended it to be consummated. Rejected, Macy reverted to type and was eventually locked away in the state penitentiary. All this happened long before Cousin Lymon arrived but inevitably Macy is eventually released, and returns to shatter the peaceful relationship between Amelia and Cousin Lymon. What makes matters worse is that Cousin Lymon transfers his affections to Macy, hero-worshipping him. Macy is everything he is not, both physically and mentally. Together they beat Amelia and trash her house and business. She is a fighter but is defeated by this betrayal and closes the cafe for good.

This is a tragic tale of unhappy love and rejection. In many ways it is a classic representation of the Southern Gothic style of writing, using macabre events and characters to comment on the history and experience of the American South.  Southern Gothic builds on the original European traditions of gothic writing, but moulds it to a specifically American purpose. The novel builds suspense slowly – much of the time Amelia and Macy are planning to fight one another, but the fight itself is delayed until the climax of the novel. The characters are grotesque – Cousin Lymon is a hunchback dwarf, Amelia is very tall and stronger than most men, and Macy is abusive and evil.

Decaying rural communities are the typical setting for Southern Gothic stories, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe certainly fulfils that criteria. Some of the more traditional features of Southern Gothic such as references to the South’s history of slavery and racism are only briefly referenced – Amelia cuts up Macy’s klan robes when he first leaves – but the motif of having a villain disguised as an innocent certainly features. Both Cousin Lymon and Macy try and reform and be kind to Amelia, but in the end both turn on her.

This was my first reading of a text by McCullers, even though I have been aware of her work for a long time. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is if nothing else a wonderful, evocative title, as is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, her other best known work. McCullers’s personal narrative is in many ways as tragic as her stories, and she is obviously an important figure in 20th century American literature. ‘Ballad’ is a relatively slight work; I am not sure it will linger long in the memory. The characters are distant and keep their thoughts and feelings closely locked away. At times they behave irrationally and while I can accept this reflects their troubled personalities it makes the narrative more a thing of curiosity than a story I could personally engage with. While her ability to evoke time and place is unquestionable, I am still unsure whether I will follow up this read with more McCullers for now.

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Book review

The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens, 1841

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The Old Curiosity Shop tells the story of Nell Trent, an orphan, cared for by  her grandfather in his antique (old curiosity) shop. Unfortunately the old man has a gambling addiction, which quickly drives them into poverty. He borrows money to fund his habit from the deliciously evil Daniel Quilp, a hunchbacked dwarf who has to be one of Dickens’ finest, funniest, most grotesque villains. Quilp repossess the shop and contents, leaving Nell and her grandfather on the streets. They embrace this as a freedom from oppression, and go on a long aimless journey that essentially lasts the rest of the novel. The shop is quietly forgotten as a motif or location in the novel – this must be one of Dickens’ most inappropriately named works!

Written as most if not all of Dickens’s novels were, in serial form, the structure of the novel is of necessity rambling, and therefore well suited to both the ‘on the road’ format of Nell and her grandfather’s journey, and the many other threads of the story that Dickens weaves into the rest of the narrative.

Probably the best known feature of this novel, and therefore not constituting a spoiler, is Nell’s eventual tragic death, succumbing to the mysterious wasting illness that ends so many young lives in nineteenth century novels. The story of people waiting at the New York docks and calling out to ask the sailors whether Nell lives is probably apocryphal, but it is a great story nonetheless, and demonstrates Dickens’ superstar status at the time. In fact Dickens signposts Nell’s fate throughout the novel, so much so that when one knows the outcome it seems a little heavy handed – lots of meditations on death, a preoccupation with the graves of younger children, several other deaths of children featuring, and so on – but Dickens obviously had to soften the blow. It was still a bold choice – he could easily have saved Nell and was under pressure to do so – but held his nerve. So perhaps not all that sentimental after all?

The real star of the show however is the demonic Quilp

Slight and ridiculous as the incident was, it made him appear such a little fiend, and withal such a keen and knowing one, that the old woman felt too much afraid of him to utter a single word, and suffered herself to be led with extraordinary politeness to the breakfast-table. Here he by no means diminished the impression he had just produced, for he ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the same time and with extraordinary greediness, drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork and spoon till they bent again, and in short performed so many horrifying and uncommon acts that the women were nearly frightened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a human creature.” 

Quilp is hunting for the runaways and at the same time pursuing a vendetta against Kit, their former assistant, who is saved by the evidence of Dick Swiveller and ‘the Marchioness’ – their relationship forming some of the most touching scenes in the novel.

Just a few perhaps somewhat random thoughts about the novel. First,  I don’t think it can be a coincidence that Dickens tells us that Nell is “not quite fourteen”. Juliet is almost exactly the same age, just two weeks short of fourteen, and Dickens, whether subconsciously or not, is inviting the reader to compare and link the two characters – Juliet also suffers a tragically early tragic death of course, another hint that this is to be Nell’s fate as well. But it also reminds the reader that Nell, while invariably described as a girl, is also seen by several men in the novel as on the cusp of becoming a young woman. She is spoken of at several points in sexualised terms. Early on her brother looks to marry her off to Richard Swiveller:

“You saw my sister Nell?’

‘What about her?’ returned Dick.

‘She has a pretty face, has she not?’

‘Why, certainly,’ replied Dick. ‘I must say for her that there’s not any very strong family likeness between her and you.’

‘Has she a pretty face,’ repeated his friend impatiently.

‘Yes,’ said Dick, ‘she has a pretty face, a very pretty face. What of that?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ returned his friend. ‘It’s very plain that the old man and I will remain at daggers drawn to the end of our lives, and that I have nothing to expect from him. You see that, I suppose?’

‘A bat might see that, with the sun shining,’ said Dick.

‘It’s equally plain that the money which the old flint—rot him—first taught me to expect that I should share with her at his death, will all be hers, is it not?’

‘I should said it was,’ replied Dick; ‘unless the way in which I put the case to him, made an impression. It may have done so. It was powerful, Fred. ‘Here is a jolly old grandfather’—that was strong, I thought—very friendly and natural. Did it strike you in that way?’

‘It didn’t strike him,’ returned the other, ‘so we needn’t discuss it. Now look here. Nell is nearly fourteen.’

‘Fine girl of her age, but small,’ observed Richard Swiveller parenthetically.

‘If I am to go on, be quiet for one minute,’ returned Trent, fretting at the slight interest the other appeared to take in the conversation. ‘Now I’m coming to the point.’

‘That’s right,’ said Dick.

‘The girl has strong affections, and brought up as she has been, may, at her age, be easily influenced and persuaded. If I take her in hand, I will be bound by a very little coaxing and threatening to bend her to my will. Not to beat about the bush (for the advantages of the scheme would take a week to tell) what’s to prevent your marrying her?’

To his credit, Dick is shocked

“‘And she “nearly fourteen”!’ cried Dick.”

Incidentally I love the way Dick is casually rude to Fred here.

The odious Quilp also plans to marry Nell when he has arranged an unfortunate accident for his first wife, and is constantly drawing attention to her attractiveness in a sexualised way:

nell and quilp

‘Such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud, neighbour,’ said Quilp, nursing his short leg, and making his eyes twinkle very much; ‘such a chubby, rosy, cosy, little Nell!’ . ‘so small, so compact, so beautifully modelled, so fair, with such blue veins and such a transparent skin, and such little feet, and such winning ways”

Dickens’s issues with much younger women have been well covered elsewhere. I appreciate that he is believed to have been working through his grief at the sudden death of his 17 year old sister-in-law when writing about Nell, but these scenes are unquestionably uncomfortable, and it is a relief when the focus moves off this aspect of the character.

Another significant feature of The Old Curiosity Shop that I noticed during this read is the frequency with which characters are anonymised. I don’t think we are ever told the name of Nell’s grandfather or great-uncle, who are known as the old man and the single man respectively. The Marchioness doesn’t know her own name, or possibly doesn’t have one, representing the depths of her abuse by the Brasses; the gentleman who offers Nell shelter at the end of the novel is referred to by all as ‘the bachelor’; even the man who offers Nell a place by his furnace is left unnamed. Why Dickens does this is unclear – in an industrial society people are often stripped of their identity as part of their reduction into the working components of their body – hence the way the term “hands” is used to describe factory workers for example – but some of the more affluent characters in the novel are treated in the same way.

Dickens is an extraordinary novelist, and despite his unquestioned status amongst English writers it could be argued he still doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Yes his characters can be two dimensional – but many are much more rounded and complex than this characterisation would suggest, Quilp being an excellent example. Yes his story lines can meander, but the way he controls his plots despite sometimes writing two novels for weekly publication at the same time is little short of amazing. He may have had issues with the sexualisation of younger women, but he created a huge range of believable and strong women characters. His writing can often be innovative and highly sophisticated, even though it was written for mass consumption. And not least, his support for the poor and down-trodden of Victorian England was authentic – he is the best advocate for social reform the working classes could have wanted:

“If they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found … and [those who rule] strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways where only Poverty may walk … In hollow voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years.”

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Book review

Comment – Charles Dickens, our most consistent novelist?

Here’s a challenge for you – which was written first, ‘Oliver Twist‘ or ‘Great Expectations’? And for a bonus point, how many years were there between these two great novels being published? dickens

The answer is in the list below – Oliver Twist was published over 20 years before Great Expectations. Other than looking it up, I can’t think of another way of working that out. There’s little in the texts by way of a clue. This question was prompted by my reading of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, this year’s Dickens. I was not sure what period of Dickens’ life and work the novel came from. Its much criticised sentimentality might suggest the work of a younger writer not yet ready to confront the complexities of human character, but many other aspects of the novel suggest a more mature author, not afraid to kill off a central character, controlling a complex plot with considerable skill, and written in a style extraordinarily rich with characterisation and descriptions.

Normally it is not that difficult to work out from which period of an author’s life a text comes. ‘The Tempest’ is so obviously late Shakespeare, reflexive and mature; ;Titus Andronicus‘ is equally obviously an immature work, derivative and clumsy; ‘Hamlet; and ‘King Lear‘ come from that intense period of creativity around the turn of the century when his powers were at their most intense. Taking another example, ‘Northanger Abbey’ is quite obviously early Austen – lighter in tone, and the jokes are not that funny; ‘Pride and Prejudice‘ and ‘Emma‘ are Austen at her best; Persuasion is late Austen, again more reflexive and mature, where happy ever after isn’t the simple solution to everyone’s problems.

With Dickens I don’t think you can make such classifications. His most striking feature as a novelist is his consistency. There is obviously a distinctive Dickensian style, and the method of publication drove the novels’ length and structure. but that was established early on and didn’t seem to change over the years.  His themes ranged from the Gordon Riots of 1780 (Barnaby Rudge) to the French Revolution (A Tale of Two Cities) but always returning to the state of industrial/Victorian England and in particular a compassionate interest in the lives of the working classes.  Pick a Dickens novel at random, and try and tell from its themes, structure, style or composition when it dates from, in relation to the rest of his work. I don’t think you can – can you?

Dickens novels in chronological order

‘Pickwick Papers’ (full title ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’) – monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837

‘Oliver Twist’ (full title ‘Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress’) – monthly serial in Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839

The Old Curiosity Shop – weekly serial in Master Humphrey’s Clock, 25 April 1840 to 6 February 1841

‘Barnaby Rudge’ (full title ‘Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty’ – weekly serial in ‘Master Humphrey’s Clock’, 13 February 1841, to 27 November 1841

‘The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit’ – monthly serial, December 1842 to July 1844

‘Dombey and Son’ (full title ‘Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation’) – monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848

‘David Copperfield’ (full title ‘The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery’) monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850

‘Bleak House’  – monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853

‘Hard Times’ (full title Hard Times: For These Times) – weekly serial in ‘Household Words’, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854

‘Little Dorrit’ – monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857

A Tale of Two Cities’ – weekly serial in ‘All the Year Round’, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859

‘Great Expectations’ – weekly serial in ‘All the Year Round’, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861

‘Our Mutual Friend’ – Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865

‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ – monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870.  (unfinished)

 

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Book review

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, 1931

Lost world novels were very popular during the end of the major period of European colonisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. King Solomon’s Mines for example establishes many of the characteristics of the genre, and is sometimes considered the first lost-world narrative. European explorers set out to an unexplored part of the lovecraftworld, often protected by some great natural barrier which has previously prevented it from being explored, and discover a great civilisation which they set out to subdue. Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1918), are all classic examples of this genre. As time went on, unexplored lands were becoming hard to find, which perhaps explains why Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is set in one of the last remaining wildernesses on earth, the Antarctic.

It seems certain that Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written almost a century earlier than Lovecraft’s novella, was also an inspiration, hinting as it does at there being undiscovered mysteries at the South Pole, and is explicitly referenced in the later novel at several points.

Written ostensibly as a warning against a forthcoming Antarctic expedition, the first person narration by the geologist and explorer William Dyer, a professor at Arkham’s Miskatonic University, tells the story of his earlier disastrous expedition.

The novel adopts a traditional horror structure of hinting at unknown terrors to be revealed, and only describing them with reluctance after long delays. This is a conventional way of building suspense, but as a warning to the world not to disturb the Antarctic it is hardly convincing. The reader is always happy to suspend disbelief if given a decent enough reason to do so, but when the narrator behaves irrationally and unrealistically like this it undermines the credibility of the relationship between the reader and the text.

The details of the expedition are thoroughly and exhaustively set out, and initially all goes well. The narrator reminds us what we are told we already know, namely that the expedition’s advance party reported the discovery of the remains of prehistoric life-forms unknown to science, before being mysteriously wiped out.  Some form of dissection experiment has been done on one of the slaughtered explorers. Another member of the party is missing – did he go mad and massacre everyone one before heading out into the snow?

Dyer and a fellow explorer, Danforth, fly across the mountain range against which the advance party had pitched camp and discover a massive abandoned city, unlike anything found elsewhere on earth. They explore the city and find murals which tell the history of this lost civilisation. It is at this point that Lovecraft aficionados will start to sit up and listen, as more of the myth of ancient aliens with which Lovecraft is most closely associated is laid out. This city was built by the “Elder Things” in the very early days of the earth’s history, with the help of “shoggoths” — bio-engineered creatures they created to act as their slaves. It takes Dyer and Danforth a while to put the pieces together, and I suspect most readers will be there well ahead of them, but they finally work out that the slaughter at the camp was caused by the Elder Things who have somehow been reanimated. That’s not the end of their problems, because it seems that while the Elder Things killed out of curiosity, hence the attempts at dissection, the shoggoths have also survived and are getting peckish.

There are a number of problems with this novel, not least the structure which makes little sense in the context of it being presented as a warning to the world. There is no character development whatsoever, indeed almost no characterisation – all the explorers are diligent, good at their jobs, but completely anonymous and interchangeable. In terms of the plot the aliens are all there is – there’s no-one working secretly to undermine the expedition, sending secrets to an enemy nation keen to capture the alien technology. The aliens themselves are dull. Virtually all of the first half of the novel is a long set up for the visit to the lost city, where the interpretation of the murals tells the history of the Elder Ones. Devotees of all things Cthulhu will enjoy the canonical detail about the Elder Ones and their intergalactic struggles with the Mi-Go – but it left me cold. The horror element of the story is very limited in impact, and as an adventure story it also misses out – the first person narrative tells us that Dyer survives his ordeal, were that to be in any doubt. The novella is at least short, and I can now honestly say I have given Lovecraft the benefit of the doubt. This is a curiosity, nothing more, and unless you are into alternative mythologies, and I can’t imagine why you would be, I would give this a miss.

 

 

 

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Book review

The Murders in the Rue Morgue and other stories, by Edgar Allan Poe

I was pretty dismissive of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher‘ last month, but I thought I would give Poe a second chance. This is a collection of his shorter stories including:

a) The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is best known for developing the template for the modern detective story. Two women are brutally murdered in a classic locked room mystery. Numerous witnesses overhear what they believe to be the murderers. An amateur detective, Monsieur Dupin, investigates, accompanied and narrated by a poefaithful sidekick on hand to record his powers of deduction. The mystery has a farcical and preposterous solution involving an orang-utang, but the features of the detective fiction, including the demonstration of analytical powers before the main crime occurs, the incompetent and bumbling police, deductive analytical processes, even the habit of remaining secluded when not on a case, they are all there. Conan Doyle acknowledges as much by explicitly referencing Dupin in an early Holmes story. This tale is full of holes – the room in which the deaths occur just happens to have a window with a secret catch allowing it to open undetected, for reasons never clearly explained, and the introduction of an orang-utang as the mystery killer made me laugh out loud.

Incidentally I know the illustration here is ridiculous as well (as being gruseome – as are all the others you can find online) but there isn’t a way of illustrating the story without being ridiculous.

b) ‘William Wilson‘ is a well-constructed portrait of schizophrenia. If it was published today it would be unsuccessful – modern readers schooled in the ideas of psychotherapy will recognise very early in the many clues that the two characters, with the same name, appearance, age etc are one and the same person, but to readers of the 1840’s the story’s conclusion may well have been shocking.

c) ‘The Masque of the Red Death‘ is by comparison a dud, in which the supernatural is used as a deus ex machina that we see coming a long way off, and has little else to commend it.

d) ‘The Pit and the Pendulum‘. In this story the narrator is thrown into prison by the Inquisition, and awaits death by means of either a – well, you can guess. The tension is built slowly and effectively, and the prison/torture chamber is ingeniously recreated. The outcome, the narrator’s survival, is ensured by his ability to tell the tale, but his escape from the Inquisition is well managed.

e) ‘Hop-Frog‘ returns to a more fairy-story theme begun in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’.  Set in an unidentified European country in the Middle Ages, a cruel king is unkind to his court jester, and suffers revenge appropriate to his offences.

f) ‘The Case of Amontillado’. A collection of short stories within the horror genre would not be complete without a take featuring someone walled into their grave, and this is it. It is reasonably well done but takes a considerable effort to suspend belief long enough to be in any way disturbed by the outcome, given that it is flagged so early on.

g) ‘The Tell-Tale Heart‘. “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man”. This is a well-written short story in which a man commits a murder, but is betrayed by the sound of the still beating heart. It’s a convincing portrait of psychopathy, in which the speech patterns of the killer, the use of repetition

h) ‘The Man that was Used Up‘ is an extended shaggy dog story not worth the short time it would take to read; the joke falls very flat despite the prolonged set up, at least in part because the narrator is such a boor.

Overall these stories are interesting early examples of the horror genre, and are worth reading for the introduction to the model for Sherlock Holmes if nothing else. I am not sure to what extent Poe’s original readers would have found these stories scary or horrific; they have not aged well as our appetites for blood and guts has become more extreme. Usually attempts at humour fall flat, and it is the simpler stories such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ which are the more effective.

 

 

 

 

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