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Book review

Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, 1748 – Volume 2

Volume 2 of ‘Clarissa’ is extraordinarily like volume 1 – Clarissa’s family send various people to try to persuade her to comply with their wishes, she in reply explains her adamantine opposition to Mr Solmes. Lovelace, the libertine suitor who her family have rejected, lurks in the background, waiting for his opportunity. Every word is recorded faithfully for Miss Howes, Clarissa’s faithful friend, who in return occasionally chips in with some moderately helpful advice. Miss Howes’ suitor Mr Hickman appears briefly, but is dismissed primarily as a nuisance to be dealt with once the main drama is concluded.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion at times that Clarissa is enjoying being the centre of attention, even though the threat she is living under is real enough. She generates vast volumes of letters, often several in one day, but her practical problems of getting these to Miss Howes – there is some clumsy business with a loose brick in the garden wall – are overlooked. Email would have been so convenient to imprisoned young women in the eighteenth century!

With so little ground to cover, and so many pages to fill, Richardson inevitably gets long-winded, as in this extract from letter 43, which for me is also an example of pretty clumsy writing

“If the thing requested be of greater consequence, or even of equal, to the person sought to, and it were, as the old phrase has it, to take a thorn out of one’s friend’s foot to put in into one’s own, something might be said— nay, it would be, I will venture to say, a selfish thing in us to ask a favour of a friend which would subject that friend to the same or equal inconvenience as that from which we wanted to be relieved, the requested would, in this case, teach his friend, by his own selfish example, with much better reason, to deny him, and despise a friendship so merely nominal.”

Moments of actual activity, rather than debate about a daughter’s duties, are rare, and the format Richardson has adopted makes it impossible for him to describe any such action when it does happen other than in retrospect. He increasingly resorts to having people scribble notes as they wait for someone to arrive, and then breathlessly report on what has happened, with the events themselves being the one time the screen goes blank. The constraints of the format occasionally lead to Richardson breaking his own rules – footnotes begin to appear from the anonymous editor of the correspondence, pointing out various contradictions in the characters’ behaviour. Using correspondence allows the author to give us directly and immediately the character’s thoughts and feelings, but the other shortcomings of the form are becoming more obvious as the novel progresses.

Despite being her intimate correspondence, Clarissa rarely tells us what she is really feeling – she instead spends a huge amount of time setting out what she believes she ought to think and feel. Which is why her dream recounted in letter 34, when the prospect of a forced marriage with Solmes seems imminent, is revealing:

‘Methought my brother, my uncle Antony, and Mr. Solmes, had formed a plot to destroy Mr. Lovelace; who discovering it, and believing I had a hand in it, turned all his rage against me. I thought he made them all fly to foreign parts upon it; and afterwards seizing upon me, carried me into a church-yard; and there, notwithstanding, all my prayers and tears, and protestations of innocence, stabbed me to the heart, and then tumbled me into a deep grave ready dug, among two or three half-dissolved carcases; throwing in the dirt and earth upon me with his hands, and trampling it down with his feet.’

There is a real and immediate physicality to this that is absent in the rest of Clarissa’s letters, real violence. Dirt and half-dissolved carcases are not the kind of things young Georgian ladies are meant to dream or talk about. It is tempting to interpret this as a sex dream, with its reference to stabbing and tumbling, and of course one would expect a young woman of this era to be apprehensive about the impending loss of her virginity – “innocence” – on her marriage, but I think the genuine fear here is palpable. For once this is no longer a game for Clarissa – she is slowly beginning to realise that sooner or later she is going to have to leave her warm protective family home with its servants and high garden walls, and have to face the real world in which she will be another man’s possession. No wonder she is terrified.

 

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Book review

Clarissa Harlowe, or the history of a young lady, by Samuel Richardson, 1748

Further subtitled “Comprehending the most Important Concerns of Private Life. And particularly shewing, The Distresses that may attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage“.

The good news is that I have finally finished volume one of ‘Clarissa’.

The bad news – for me – is that I have another eight volumes to go! This is indeed a monster of a novel, running to over 1500 pages. To preserve my sanity I am going to approach it as a series of novels, and may well break it up with lighter reading,

First impressions:

Clarissa is an epistolary novel, where the narrative is progressed through the characters’ correspondence. This has the advantage of showing us their thoughts and feelings, and given the frenzy with which Clarissa and her friends and family write letters, sometimes several in one day, including to members of the same household, gives an immediate reportage feel to the novel. The disadvantage of this format is that without an omniscient narrator there is little in the way of descriptive writing – we are only told what the characters believe to be relevant, which excludes the setting, their appearance, etc.

Clarissa, a rich young lady, is the subject of a fierce battle of will between herself and her family. Her father and other relatives want her to marry Mr Solmes, an even richer young man, who promises to add to the family’s overall wealth and status, and believe it is their right to dispose of their daughter as they see fit. She is valuable property, the more so now her grandfather has recently bequeathed her some money. She is disinclined to accept these arrangements. The family believe her refusal stems from an attachment to an unsuitable young man, Mr Lovelace. She adamantly denies any such attachment, but Richardson skilfully uses the differences between her descriptions of events and those of others to allow the reader to deduce that there may be some truth in their suspicions. An impasse is reached, which is where volume one ends, with the family resorting to ever more forceful attempts to persuade Clarissa to accept Mr Solmes, and she equally forcefully rejecting him.

The bulk of the novel (this volume at least) is formed of letters between Clarissa and her friend, Miss Howe. It is a significant moment when a third voice is introduced, that of Lovelace, who reveals himself as the libertine Clarissa’s family fears him to be. In Letter 35 Lovelace boasts to a friend,

“I will throw myself into my charmer’s presence. I have twice already attempted it in vain. I shall then see what I may depend upon from her favour. If I thought I had no prospect of that, I should be tempted to carry her off. That would be a rape worthy of Jupiter!”

This is one of those sentences that brings the reader up short – is Lovelace really lasciviously anticipating raping Clarissa? My initial reaction was that he might be using the word ‘rape’ in a special, eighteenth century context, a robust form of seduction. The word ‘ravish’ is sometimes used in this way, implying a more complex relationship than a simple assault. But I think that would be letting Lovelace off the hook – he clearly has every intention of having sex with Clarissa, and her consent is of little concern to him. Richardson makes it clear that Lovelace considers having sex with women a form of revenge.

“A rape worthy of Jupiter”.

We are, in this one packed phrase, at the heart of the novel’s sexual politics – Clarissa is a possession, the most prized component of which (in addition to her grandfather’s inheritance) is her sexual attractiveness, and in particular her ability to provide an heir. It is that value which is threatened by the lothario Lovelace, and that which her family imprison her in order to protect. It is another example of the double standards of the time, that Lovelace’s reputation for immoral behaviour is something that can quickly be forgotten when it comes to considering him a potential groom, when set against his considerable fortune and expectations.

Only eight more volumes to go!

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, Pilgrim's Progress

The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, 1678

Subtitled ‘From This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream’.

bunyanThis is the third time I have recently tried to read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ – each time previously I gave up simply due to lack of interest. Bunyan’s style is said to be straightforward, but I found the insistent preaching and sermonising soporific. This completed reading was finally achieved only through gritted teeth and from a stubborn determination not to be beaten a third time. Yet here’s the thing – ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ has been in print for almost 350 years, has a strong claim to be the first novel written in English (it has characters, tells a story, and is in prose) and had a profound influence on many novelists. All stories of personal development or growth own a debt to Bunyan, and many including ‘Little Women’, ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ acknowledge their debt explicitly. Wikipedia claims that the novel “is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature” and goes on to claim that it has been translated into more than 200 languages. So my challenge was to find the value in this novel despite the teeth gritting.
You will be familiar with the plot, such as it is. Christian, fearing for his immortal soul, leaves his life of sinfulness and goes on a pilgrimage to find the Celestial City. He meets a range of challenges to his faith, some trivial, some less so, all of which he overcomes, to finally arrive at the Promised Land and be welcomed into heaven. A sequel, published several years after the first part, follows Christian’s wife and children as they follow a very similar path to that of the first novel – after a bit of an internal debate I decided not to read the sequel, despite it being described on publication as the second part of the story.

The circumstances of the publication of this novel are almost as well-known as the story itself. Bunyan belonged to a very small non-conformist church in Bedford, and took to preaching around the countryside in direct convention of the strict laws of the time, following the restoration of the monarchy. His original sentence was three months, but as he refused to undertake to not repeat his offence his sentence was extended repeatedly – he eventually served twelve years, leaving his young wife and four children destitute.

It is easy to overlook the positives in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. The problem in part is one of familiarity – we have all grown up with Giant Despair, The Slough of Despond, and Mr Worldly-Wiseman, and take their inventiveness for granted. But apart from this quality, taking the text as it reads in the present, I found very little else of value. Bunyan uses his parable to preach unremittingly at the reader. The formula he adopts is rigidly adhered to – his pilgrim, Christian, meets a character representing the personification of a sin, is tempted, (sometimes not), overcomes the challenge, and moves on. I am simplifying of course, but this is the structure for the whole novel, and there never comes a moment where the reader expects anything else to happen. Bunyan quickly runs out of serious sins, and has to resort to relatively innocuous offences – formalism, timorousness, discontent and talkativeness to name a few, which gives these sections of the novel a slightly ridiculous tone.

Later, Christian sees his fellow pilgrim, Faithful, brutally executed in Vanity Fair:
“They therefore brought him out, to do with him according to their law; and, first, they scourged him, then they buffeted him, then they lanced his flesh with knives; after that, they stoned him with stones, then pricked him with their swords; and, last of all, they burned him to ashes at the stake. Thus came Faithful to his end.”

Despite the horrors of this death, Christian takes Faithful’s martyrdom in his stride and through divine intervention escapes a similar fate. Later he meets with another pilgrim, Hopeful, and together they bully a third pilgrim, whom Bunyan labels Ignorance. Ignorance is not English, nor a follower of the Church of England. He comes from “the country of Conceit”. He is described as “a very brisk lad”, and speaks respectfully to Christian:
“Sir, I was born in the country that lieth off there a little on the left hand, and I am going to the Celestial City.”
In answer to Christian’s questioning about his credentials – “what have you to show at that gate, that may cause that the gate should be opened to you?” he replies again respectfully
“I know my Lord’s will, and I have been a good liver; I pay every man his own; I pray, fast, pay tithes, and give alms, and have left my country for whither I am going.”
Christian is having none of this
“But thou camest not in at the wicket-gate that is at the head of this way; thou camest in hither through that same crooked lane, and therefore, I fear, however thou mayest think of thyself, when the reckoning day shall come, thou wilt have laid to thy charge that thou art a thief and a robber, instead of getting admittance into the city.”

In other words, living well, paying your way, and knowing the Lord’s will, isn’t enough for Christian. He takes it on himself to challenge Ignorance’s right to aspire to redemption in the first place. Ignorance politely asks him to leave him alone – this is becoming suspiciously like bullying:
“Gentlemen, ye be utter strangers to me, I know you not; be content and follow the religion of your country, and I will follow the religion of mine”
That’s not enough for Christian who speaks to Hopeful, “whisperingly,
“There is more hope of a fool than of him.””
When Ignorance finally arrives at the Celestial City he is dealt with brutally,
“the King…commanded the two Shining Ones… to go out and take Ignorance, and bind him hand and foot, and have him away. Then they took him up, and carried him through the air to the door that I saw in the side of the hill, and put him in there. Then I saw that there was a way to hell”
None of those nasty foreigners in our Celestial City, thank you very much!

Christians might enjoy having their beliefs confirmed by this novel, but otherwise I would not recommend exhuming this one from the archives.

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20th century Literature, Book review, Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing, 1988

thefifthchildThis disturbing novella by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing was very different from what I expected it to be. The cover of the Paladin paperback edition is illustrated by what I immediately recognised as an enchanting picture of an impish young child by Mervyn Peake. As well as being one of my all-time favourite authors (and if you haven’t read the extraordinary Gormenghast trilogy, Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone, you really should) Peake was also an exceptional artist and illustrator. This drawing (probably of one of his sons) was done may years before this book was published, so quite how it came to be used to promote this novel is a bit of a mystery. Unsurprisingly, the picture is utterly inappropriate, as I will explain in a moment, but the combination of the cover, the price (£1 in a charity book shop) and some residual guilt that the only books I had read by Lessing was her disappointing ‘Golden Notebook’ and the more recent ‘The Good Terrorist’ made the purchase a no-brainer.

So to the novella itself. David and Harriet Lovatt, unconventional in their conventionality, meet, marry, and start a family in their huge house in the suburbs. All is bucolic and happy until Harriet falls pregnant for the fifth time. At this point the novel takes a very dark turn – Ben, her child is a violent, disturbed creature.
“He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped from his eyebrows to his crown. His hair grew in an unusual pattern from the double crown where started a wedge or triangle that came low on the forehead, the hair lying forward in a thick yellowish stubble, while the side and back hair grew downwards. His hands were thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms. He opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother’s face. They were focussed greeny-yellow eyes, like lumps of soapstone.”
(Someone must have seen the Peake drawing, and thought “that’ll do”)
Ben has all the makings of a psychopath, and in caring for him his family is torn apart. His condition is never diagnosed – his doctors and teachers refuse to acknowledge he is anything other than a little slow – and while the possibility of it being a form of autism isn’t considered in the novel, his condition is contrasted with that of a cousin with Down’s Syndrome. This refusal to name Ben’s condition allows the reader to project the ills of the world onto his broad misshapen shoulders – he represents whatever we want him to represent. Increasingly Harriet comes to speculate that he is a genetic throwback, a troglodyte or goblin, which is a horrible example of the stigmatisation of the disabled which may have been acceptable in the 1980’s but now seems barbaric, and which we rightly have come to reject in this century.
This book is hard to categorise. Certainly there are horror elements, and the book is sometimes marketed as a horror story. Equally, it is a commentary on child-rearing in modern society – Lessing seemed to be going through something of a ‘isn’t the modern world a terrible place’ phase, (compare the reactionary tone of ‘The Good terrorist’ for example – so the fact that Ben goes through school without learning how to read or write, and without his teachers really being concerned about that, is taken as an indictment of modern attitudes towards education. Law and order in society begins to break down and deteriorates throughout the novel, adding to the ‘things aren’t what they used to be in my day’ atmosphere.
There is an air of unreality to the novel which heightens the horrific element. The way Ben’s condition is portrayed varies wildly – although he is unwell enough to be consigned to an asylum he is also well enough to go through several years of school. Time flies past unevenly, and the whole family structure is funded by a rich yacht selling grandfather who turns up every now and then to write a cheque. The social commentary rarely goes beyond the clumsy portrait of doctors and teachers who blame Harriet for her child’s behaviour. The family portrait that initially promises to form the heart of the novel fragments after Ben’s birth, and the portrait of a marriage crumbling under the strains imposed by a disabled child are some of the most successful aspects of the book.
Overall, I thought that ‘The Fifth Child’ had more of the feel of an early or discarded draft. I feel Lessing really struggled to work out what she wanted to say with this novel, and in the end decided, like the novel’s cover illustration editor, ‘that will do’.
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Book review, History, Second World War, Nazis, Stargardt, Holocaust

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45 by Nicholas Stargardt, 2015

I don’t think we can ever understand too much about how the Second World War and the Holocaust happened – nor can we ever reach a complete understanding of these events. The approach Stargardt uses in this masterly, sweeping portrait of the German nation during the war is to describe events through the diaries and letters of ordinary German people. In the book’s opening he describes these as a “cast” of ‘dramatis personae’. In so far as such a thing is possible, these are a diverse range of people – farmers, artisans, veterans, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. Stargardt overlays their stories onto the events of the war itself.germanwar

This approach immediately destroys the simplistic notion that there is such a thing as a single, coherent German perception of Nazism – they all experience it differently, from enthusiastic nationalistic support through passive grudging acceptance, to resistance. Even within each personal experience perceptions change over time and the course of the war, so passionate Nazis eventually become reluctant defeatists.

There are inevitably shocking moments in a history of these events. For me two sections stood out, both related to the holocaust. The first is how widely the holocaust was known about. Stargardt illustrates this by showing that references to the extermination of European Jewry pervaded throughout German society, even down to playground chants and jokes. However powerful the German propaganda ministry may have been, it was powerless to prevent German soldiers taking photographs of mass graves and sending them home to be processed and shared. This may not be a new historical perspective – I understand from reading other reviews such as this fascinating account in the New York Times that the fact that the genocide was widely know about throughout German society has been demonstrated by earlier historians – but it was the first time I had read the detail of how commonly known the holocaust was. Of course it was in German post-war society’s interest to cover this up, developing the myth that the Nazi’s were some alien force that had been inflicted on the otherwise honourable German peoples, but to see in black and white the evidence that the holocaust was an accepted fact throughout Germany, and indeed the rest of Europe, was for me shocking and distressing.

I am also aware of the long running debate about the extent to which the Catholic Church in Germany (and Italy) collaborated with the Nazis. Again this book developed that debate further for me with its chapters on how the church responded to the Nazis programme of killing ‘defective’ patients in mental and maternity hospitals. Some Catholic bishops preached against this murder from their pulpits, and the Nazis briefly pulled back. The killings didn’t stop, they simply became more discrete and less open, and t
he clergy knew they were continuing – but for some this intervention probably saved their lives. Yet no similar intervention ever happened for the Jews, despite specific please for help – in fact the church spent most of its time justifying the defence of the fatherland from the atheistic Bolsheviks.

It is always a useful exercise to try to see events from another perspective. It is no surprise that the German people saw the war differently from the Allies – for example, the invasion of Poland was a response to incursions by Polish forces into Germany, and to prevent attacks on German nationals living in Polish territory; the blitz was bringing Britain to the brink of revolution, and was simply a response to terror attacks on German cities by the RAF, and so on. Sometimes this was simply a matter of Nazis propaganda being swallowed uncritically;  but at other times it was a more complex working out of the contradictions that inevitably arose when German culpability could not be avoided.

This is not a conventional history of the Second World War, the German War as Stargardt describes it, and it is certainly not an easy read – the paperback runs to over 700 pages, with more than 100 pages of notes, bibliography and references. The material is inevitably almost unremittingly bleak and hard to read, but there are lighter moments, occasionally, and some touches of humanity. Despite all this it is an important story – perhaps now more than ever with a demagogue looking to demonise minorities entering the White House – and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring

The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1988

‘The Beginning of Spring’ tells the story of the Reid family. Living in Moscow, (although originally from Salford and Norbury), the Reid’s are Frank, a printer, his wife Nellie, and their three lively children. The novel opens with Nellie’s apparently sudden decision to leave her husband and travel back to England. This breakup provides a backdrop to the novel, but the reasons for the parting are only returned to at the end of the story, and are not explored in any detail. If their married life together was unhappy we are not told in what way. Much of the novel is concerned with the day to day business of managing Frank’s household and print works, and while this is done in very convincing detail – I have no doubt the author’s research was immaculate – it felt like the inclusion of research detail without adding anything to the narrative. I need to consider whether that is fair – is the printing business a metaphor for the way the characters slowly and meticulously present their lives to one another? I suspect not. More convincingly, the printing industry is facing an imminent technological revolution – the introduction of ‘hot metal’ type setting, which foreshadows the revolution about to sweep across Russia. The other metaphor for the pending revolution Fitzgerald uses is meteorological – the beginning of spring in Russia sees the river ice melt, and the houses being thrown open to the mother of all spring cleans. While change is anticipated, and the Russia state is obviously close to breakdown, there is no real sense of menace or impending doom in the novel – Frank has carefully prepared his own retreat from Moscow should it be necessary, and we have no reason to believe that he would not be back in Norbury in time for Christmas should it be necessary.

This is all done with a light touch, but this isn’t a political novel, and despite the setting the real interest lies in the relationships between the central characters. Frank and Nellie’s marriage remains a largely closed book, but it is no surprise that when Frank employs a new nanny, Lisa Ivanovna, to care for the boisterous, confident children, he promptly and predictably falls for her. Lisa is impassive in the face of his tentative advances, and then also mysteriously leaves.

Fitzgerald disappointingly leaves her female characters largely silent. We get no direct insight into their thoughts and feelings; instead the focus remains on the male protagonists. While the narrator keeps a respectful distance we are told sufficient to allow us to work out what they are thinking – the reader is able to discern Frank’s blossoming affection for Lisa, for example, before even he is aware of it. Nellie is a “modern” woman (in the meaning of the phrase at the time, someone who is prepared to countenance pre-marital sex) and is prepared to follow her husband across Europe to preserve her family; she is also prepared to break her family up and abandon her young children. The reader can only guess at her reasons for leaving her husband, and for contemplating a relationship with Selwyn Crane, Frank’s aesthetic accountant.

This novel is full of gentle humour – I particularly liked the sister in law whose conversation revolved around damp – and the pages flew past very quickly, mainly it has to be said in search of something happening. There are some incidents in the novel, but they are sporadic and unconnected, such as the break-in at the print works, or the short holiday at the dacha. I know the intelligent reader will be saying at this point “Or are they?” (unconnected, that is) – and of course it wouldn’t be too hard to construct a narrative/interpretive thread between this series of incidents. This is the kind of novel where the reader has to do a lot of the work – and sometimes that is not worth the effort. There are enough clues in the novel, for example, to construct Nellie’s back story, an explanation for her departure at the beginning of the novel and her even more mysterious return, but I am not invested sufficiently in the characters to do this – I simply don’t care about them enough.

In her book about Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee quotes her as saying that she was very interested in the period 1912-13, just before the first world war. It was, she said, “a time of very great hope… of the coming of the 20th century, hopes of a New Life, a new world, the New Woman, a new relationship between the artist and the craftsman”. Seeing this novel in that light, as a portrait of possibilities, is helpful, but it still had an incomplete, snapshot feel to it that was unsatisfying. Is it unreasonable of me to want more? Surely it is in the nature of a novel rather than a short story to tell us more than “something happened”?

In preparing this review I came across this contemporaneous review in the New York Times. As well as being a worthwhile read on its own merits, I mention it because it mentions the echoes of E M Forster that I also noticed in reading this novel.

Finally, despite this novel’s fine writing, strong characterisation (of the male characters at least), the excellent research (into arcane and obscure details of the Edwardian printing industry in tsarist Russia) and dry humour, I have to wonder how it ended up on the Guardian’s list of the 100 best novel’s written in English. The citation – “a brilliant miniature…a short book with a sly and gentle sensibility, that somehow comprehends a whole world, and many lives.” – borders on hyperbole, but even if you take this commendation unchallenged still doesn’t approach the greatness the list aspired to classify.

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Book review, ronson, shamed

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson, 2015

soyouvebeenpubliclyshamedThis book tells the salutory stories of people who were publicly shamed – and then pilloried, sacked, disgraced and hounded to severe depression and worse – for posting inappropriate comments and pictures on social media. In most cases the online response was massively disproportionate compared to the original offence. Ronson goes on to discuss public shaming in its historical context, and how people can now massage their online existence to hide previous offences.

‘Shamed’ is based around a series of interviews and follow up investigations. It is an easy, undemanding read, as anyone who has read any of his previous works will expect. Ronson has a bit of a butterfly mind – rather than being linear the narrative jumps around in a way that undermines the clarity of the point Ronson is trying to make, as if he is uncertain as to what that point really is. But there are enough interesting insights along the way to make this a worthwhile read, if not a manifesto for changing the way we behave online. Most of the lessons one might draw from the experiences illustrated are fairly obvious – don’t overshare online, dark or ironic humour doesn’t usually work online when stripped of its context, people sometimes overreact, often quite deliberately, and so on.

Most of the people Ronson interviewed for the book wanted to forget the whole incident and get on with their lives, and in featuring them here he has ironically given their mistakes a whole new lease of life. Why they agreed to be interviewed is unclear – Ronson is a sympathetic interviewer, and allows them to give their side of the story (invariably it is the same story, of a bad joke being taken seriously, because social media robs edgy humour of all its necessary context), but the end result remains a further round of publicity for their blunders.

This is a careful and balanced exploration of the risks and benefits of social media. Ronson explains that he has used Twitter himself to publicly shame people who he thinks have abused public platforms such as newspaper columns to make hurtful comments. Social media could be a force for good, giving a voice to the general populace. But more often than not it is used to undermine and abuse people who have either made a silly mistake, or who don’t deserve any criticism at all. This isn’t entirely persuasive – it sounds like a modern version of the conjugated verb “I use social media to highlight injustice, they abuse people behind the cloak of online anonymity, you are a troll”.

Although this book was only published last year, I couldn’t escape the thought that the events of November 8th 2016 had made it if not irrelevant then certainly out of date. In the book Ronson cites the example of Max Mosley, who was exposed as someone with esoteric sexual appetites and the deep pockets required to indulge them with professional escorts. His response when this was published was to sue the now defunct tabloid newspaper involved on the grounds that it had said the orgies were Nazi-themed rather than merely German military themed, a nuance that the judge found persuasive. Basically he rejected the narrative that said he should be ashamed of his conduct. But this response pales beside the behaviour of the President-Elect, the shameless one, who shrugged off being exposed as a tax-avoiding, draft dodging sex-offender with breath-taking chutzpah. Shame now seems so 2015.

 

 

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Book review

The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis, 1969

Kingsley Amis spent his whole career not writing a successful follow up to his great first novel,  ‘Lucky Jim’. I loved ‘Lucky Jim’ when I first read it several decades ago, and while the passage of years has eroded that affection somewhat, at the time it lead me to read as much Amis as I could get my hands on. That’s not to say Amis’s later novels were bad – the Booker prize for ‘The Old Devils’, as well as a couple of other shortlisting, attests to that. ‘The Green Man’ stood out at the time as something very different from Amis’ s usual portraits, so when the opportunity to revisit it came up I took it, wondering whether it would be as good, and as strange, as I remembered it?the-green-man

I am glad to say it was. The Green Man of the title is an inn owned and managed, after a fashion, by Maurice Allington, a another thinly disguised Amis self-portrait. The inn dates back to the 14th century, and comes with the usual stories of hauntings and the occult. Strange things start to happen. Allington sees what we are lead to believe are ghosts, although the heroic scale of his alcoholism leaves open the distinct possibility that there are just hallucinations. His elderly father suffers a stroke, which if anything spurs Allington on to even greater peaks of drinking. Nothing seems to dent his self-destructive urges, and on the day of his father’s funeral he pursues an affair with his neighbour, and persuades her to have a ménage à trois with his wife. As with many novels written by middle aged men, his sexual allure is irrestistible, and this plan succeeds, to a point – the orgy happens, but he finds it hard to get involved, and eventually gives in and goes off and has another drink.

Refusing to believe they are simply hallucinations, Maurice somehow finds the time to investigate the hauntings. He uncovers the long lost diaries of Thomas Underhill, a local scholar and former owner of the inn, who he believes to be the identity of the ghost. These diaries reveal that Underhill used the supernatural to seduce and or ravish young girls from the village, and may be the explanation for the current events. The paranormal themes of the novel now take centre stage, as it becomes clear that the ghosts are not simply the product of Maurice’s drinking (even if he is unable persuade anyone else of their authenticity). Underhill emerges from the shadows and persuades Maurice to unearth his nearby grave, in which he finds an ancient silver figurine, which in turn leads to a rather clumsy scheme which will cause the death of Maurice’s teenage daughter. Maurice frustrates this plan at the last minute, in part due to an intervention by another supernatural figure who we are led to understand is a manifestation of God. If this sounds bizarre, it is, although Amis’s undoubted skills as a story teller allow him to carry it off.

The Green Man is traditionally portrayed as a benevolent figure, and Amis’ s idea to transform him into a sinister, lumbering killer is inspired. It is a mark of a confident writer that he can combine genres – the comedy of the drunken, lecherous innkeeper frozen out of his own orgy – with the supernatural Underhill narrative. Allington is ultimately a bit of a tragic albeit resilient figure, and as usual with Amis it is the underwritten women characters who one would like to have seen more of, rather than just playing bit parts as figures of sexual interest. Overall however I was pleased to find this novel still in print, despite Amis being very much an author no longer in vogue, and enjoyed the nostalgic re-read.

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Book review

Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville, 1851

I now understand Moby Dick’s reputation for being unreadable. The core of the novel is the well-known whale-hunting adventure, with the obsessive Ahab pursuing the white whale to the ends of the farthest ocean, with the “from hell’s heart I stab at thee”, and all that.  This material would have made an excellent longer short story, a novella perhaps, with the excitement of the pursuit and the psychological portrait of the captain at its heart.zzmoby-dick

However, Melville chose to pad this story out to four or five times its length with an interminable, extraordinary amount of additional information about whales and whaling. It read very much as if he did a lot of background research to his subject and included it all in the novel. Can you imagine ‘Heart of Darkness’ with four hundred additional pages on the ivory trade? Or ‘The Great Gatsby’ with a detailed history of the prohibition movement? I found wading through the chapters on the different types of whale, how they are caught, processed, defined and anatomised really difficult, not least because of the brutality and callousness of the process, and the narrator’s wilful ignorance of the impact of nineteenth century whaling on the whale population.

If you can muscle your way past this issue, or perhaps find an expurgated version, there is plenty of interest elsewhere in the novel. Whaling was a dangerous occupation, and the thought of the small sailing boats setting off to harpoon mighty sperm whales has become an iconic image. I am sure I was not the only reader who at times was cheering on the whales. The opening chapters of the novel, when Ishmael meets Queequeg the cannibal harpooner, are very different in tone from those towards the end, and are surprisingly funny. Their relationship is openly homosexual and comically and euphemistically described. Ishmael advises the reader that it is ““Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” On their first night together sharing a bed, Ishmael catches sight of the “bald purplish head” of the “purple rascal,” and “shrieks” when Queequeg springs under the covers with his tomahawk. After some “kicking about”, Queequeg begins “feeling” Ishmael; next morning they awake with “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner…You had almost thought I had been his wife.” That Melville was able to get this past his publisher, and the reading public, probably says more about their racism towards the strange habits of the South Sea islander than it does their tolerance of alternative sexual lifestyles!

Ostensibly the narrator of the novel is Ishmael, but we are told very little of his back story, and even less about him as a character. Increasingly as time passes he fades into the background, to be replaced with a traditional omniscient narrator who can see multiple separate and simultaneous events, is able to tell us what characters are thinking and feeling, and is indistinguishable from Melville himself. Call me Ishmael if you like, but Herman would be more polite.

The climax of the novel, a reward for those who make it that far, is stunning. It shows what a good adventure novel has been struggling to emerge all that time. The white whale is sighted, pursued, harpooned, and – well for once I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice to say it was not the one I was expecting. I am conscious I am being quite philistine here – I really should be exploring the novel’s heavy symbolism, its complex literary allusions, and the multiple literary styles employed. Certainly that’s all there for the reader who wants to explore in more detail and read the text with more care – I was simply glad to make it to the other side. Incidentally, this novel ends the nineteenth century section of my read through of the Guardian’s top 100 novels written in English.

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Book review, Crime, His Bloody Project

His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet, 2015

zzhisbloodyprojectSubtitled Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae

(NB contains lots of spoilers)

The Guardian described this novel as “a slippery creature indeed”. Having read this and some other reviews, I was expecting a modernist novel, in which the unreliable narration leaves the reader to piece together their own version of what ‘really happened’. ‘His Bloody Project’ undoubtedly has some superficially modern features, most notably the use of apparently ‘found’ documents relating to the murders to construct the narrative. But don’t be either put off nor excited by this, because lurking behind this mildly unconventional façade is what I found to be in many ways a very traditional crime novel. Continue reading →

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