Category Archives: Book review

100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1926

Virago Modern Classics have done the reader no favours in managing expectations by publishing this in a twee edition illustrated with a strangely distorted ginger cat, and a quote from John Updike, author of yesterday’s reviewed novel, describing this as “witty, eerie, tender”. (How many times have you said to yourself, “You know what I need to read right now is a funny but scary but romantic novel”?)

The eponymous Lolly, a childish transliteration of Laura, is a prosperous young woman. The first third of the novel follows her very conventional background and birth, and in a fractured time scheme that must have felt very modern in the 1920’s takes the reader up to Lolly’s 47th year. Her family have long since attempted to marry her off – one suitor is dismissed with a joke about werewolves. The company of men -as potential husbands anyway – leaves her cold. She prefers wandering the more obscure parts of London looking for herbs to turn into medicines. One day she has an epiphany, and decides to break free from the patriarchal forces that have been suffocating her, and go and live alone in a small village in the middle of nowhere. Here she begins to breathe at last, but her peace is short-lived, because a visit from her nephew Titus quickly comes to feel like an invasion.

And this is where the novel takes an unexpected turn. Having been quite naturalistic for three quarters of the story, Townsend Warner introduces the occult. More specifically Lolly becomes a witch, and shortly thereafter meets Satan. This development isn’t quite as sudden as I have suggested – looking back over the text there are clues that the village of Great Mop is not the rural backwater it seems on the surface – but it is a strange turn of events nonetheless. Satan is a genial chap, whose idea of supreme evil extends as far as stinging Titus with wasps, and making his milk go off. Titus flees Great Mop, happily engaged as it happens, and the novel ends with Lolly looking forward to a long career of witchcraft, presumably fairly relaxed about the eternal damnation that will follow shortly thereafter.

The allegorical intent of the novel is not hard to decode. As is often the case, sex is at the root of it all. ‘Lolly Willowes’ is at once a manifesto for the liberation of women from patriarchy, with witchcraft being the symbolic representation of the rejection of control of women by men, but also a more subtle plea for the right of women to control their own sexuality. Lolly begins to discover her long dormant feelings when she moves to the countryside and starts to commune with nature:

“In February came a spell of fine weather. She spent whole days sitting in the woods, where the wood-pigeons moaned for pleasure on the boughs. Sometimes two cock birds would tumble together in mid air, shrieking and buffeting with their wings, and then would fly back to the quivering boughs and nurse the air into peace again. All around her the sap was rising up. She laid her cheek against a tree and shut her eyes to listen. She expected to hear the tree drumming like a telegraph pole. (page 110/111)

Admittedly there are phallic symbols aplenty here, but look at the verbs – moaning, tumbling, shrieking, buffeting, quivering, rising, drumming – this is an extraordinarily physical experience for someone just sitting still.

The novel’s climax is a witches’ Sabbath, which threatens to end in a Bacchanalian orgy – “They whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction … contact made her tingle from head to foot…like a torch she was handed on from one to another…partners came and went, figures and conformations were in a continual flux…sometimes the dancers were coupled” (159/160). This scene is followed by a more reflective conversation between Lolly and a very gentlemanly Satan, dressed as a gamekeeper, her very own Mellors. Lolly explains her conversion to witchcraft in a quite sad, melancholy speech, only some of which I can offer here:

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others….That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure… When I think of witches I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men…there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishclothes on currant bushes, and for diversion each others silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen”.
There definitely is a poignancy and tenderness to this unexpected ending to what starts as such a conventional novel. Once I had taken time to comes to terms with the subversion of my expectations about the direction and tone of the novel, I liked it!
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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Uncategorized

Rabbit Redux – John Updike – 1971

The Penguin Modern Classics editions of Updike’s Rabbit quartet (Run, Redux, Rich, and at Rest) contain an afterword by the author which in some ways makes the reviewer redundant, offering insight into the composition of the novels to which few could hope to achieve. Of course, I am going to have a try.

Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle aged, blue-collar AmericZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZan. His wife is sleeping with a work colleague, and soon leaves Rabbit and his teenage son Nelson. Harry is in a dead end job as a print-setter, which even in 1969, the novel’s setting, was clearly becoming obsolete. The reproductions of Harry’s set type which appear in the novel are cruelly riddled with errors, suggesting he isn’t even any good at his job. While the narrative point of view is largely Harry’s/Rabbit’s, we do not gain much insight into his feelings. He seems to take his wife’s betrayal in his stride, although it obviously hits him harder than he realises, as is shown later in the novel when his behaviour begins to get more erratic. Invited out by a work colleague, a black man who Harry would normally not associate, Harry picks up Jill, a wealthy 18 year old young woman fleeing suburban Connecticut. Although more like his lost daughter than a replacement wife, she moves in with him and Nelson. Later her  ‘friend’ Skeeter, a radical Vietnam veteran follows her and also moves in, causing scandal in the neighbourhood.  While Harry and Nelson are out visiting friends the house suffers an arson attack, and Jill is killed. Finally, in the aptly named Safe Haven motel, Harry reconciles with his wife, after a fashion, and they fall asleep together.

The period setting of the novel provides an important backdrop to its events. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon – Harry watches the landing on a fuzzy black and white television in his mother’s bedroom. Race riots break out across America, and the war in Vietnam continues to divide the country. Harry is defiantly conservative in the face of several protest voices, not least Skeeter, who challenges him on issues of race and the war.

It has to be said that Harry is not a pleasant character. He is unashamedly racist, sexually exploits the clearly vulnerable Jill, who is half his age,  and takes pleasure from hurting her during sex. He beats his wife when he finds out she has been unfaithful, and is a poor father. He has many other faults which I am not going to spell out here – suffice to say he is a hard hero to like.

It’s equally hard to avoid the simple reading of this novel that has Harry as an extended metaphor for America. Updike specifically invites this comparison in his afterword – “The character of Harry Angstrom was, for me, a way in – a ticket to the America all around me.” Skeeter’s “invasion” of Harry’s home, hard to understand otherwise, is representative of the rise of black power in America, the intrusion of what Harry/Updike sees as an alien race. His values – paternity, patriotism, fidelity – are under attack from all around. In other words this is a deeply conservative novel in which Harry struggles to at first resist, then come to terms with the changes sweeping America in the late 60’s. He is a victim throughout the novel, weakly accepting what happens to him, not challenging his wife’s lover when he confronts him, taking redundancy without complaint, even spinelessly accepting Skeeter’s moving into his house and sleeping with Jill – he doesn’t like it, but he can do nothing about it. He has a sharp tongue towards his family and friends, but is a profoundly weak man. The reader feels sorry for Harry, perhaps, but that’s the extent of it.

Reading the second novel in a quartet is not the best way to approach a writer’s output (I started the Harry Potter series by reading The Goblet of Fire, stupidly) but I am torn on whether I want to read more about Rabbit. What might bring me back, one day, is Updike’s undoubted way with a sentence:

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation”.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review

The Heat of the Day –Elizabeth Bowen – 1948

Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Heat of the Day’ has strong echoes of Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Affair’. It is set in London during the second world war, where tHeathe threat of sudden death from the Blitz leads to people to live their lives with a sense of urgency. Bowen’s evocation of life in London during this period is one of the strongest features of this otherwise flawed novel:

“The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain”. (10)

“Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling”. (114)

“Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire–nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated to the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else.”

Bowen’s language, and in particular her sentence construction, is interesting. At first you wonder whether English is her first language, given how unnatural some sentences sound:

“The restaurant at which they met most often was this morning, he was sorry to tell her, closed.”(115)

Would not that sentence have flowed more naturally with the words “was” and “closed” together, for example

“The restaurant at which they met most often was closed this morning, he was sorry to tell her” or

“The restaurant at which they met most often, he was sorry to tell her, was closed.” Or even

“He was sorry to tell her that the restaurant at which they met most often was closed”

But it is a fair assumption that writers do things like this for a reason. In this case I am sure that the impact this slightly awkward sentence construction had on me, which was to read the sentence twice or more, was deliberate. This technique is intended to keep the reader focussed, preventing them from reading passively. I have a vivid memory of Kingsley Amis doing this in a novel of his which I haven’t read for a long time, but must revisit, ‘The Green Man’. Anthony Burgess does the same thing in one of his Enderby novels when he brilliantly constructs a sentence in which the word “onions” is repeated four times, but which remains syntactically correct. Coming back to ‘The Heat of the Day’ for a moment, Bowen also conveys the hesitancy of her character with this technique.

Probably the weakest, least interesting aspect of the novel is the contrived, unconvincing, plot. Stella Rodney, a middle-aged woman who works for the government, is propositioned by Harrison, a shadowy figure who seems to be in love with her. Harrison tells Stella that her boyfriend/lover, Robert Kelway is spying for Germans. He promises not to report Robert if she becomes his lover. This sordid proposition forms the core of the narrative – Stella cannot decide whether to take Harrison seriously or not, so extraordinary is his proposal. While she thinks it over, we are told in flashback of the first time she met Harrison, at the funeral of a relative who has left his substantial property in Ireland to her son, Roderick, who is now in the Army. Eventually, after a trip to the estate in Ireland, Stella asks Robert about Harrison’s accusations – he of course denies the accusation, and then proposes to her. However, we later find out that the accusation is true – Robert is a German spy, even though he was wounded at Dunkirk. He confesses all to Stella, and in an attempt to escape from her flat falls from the roof and is killed – the novel deliberately leaves it ambiguous as to whether this is an accident or suicide. The novel then quickly draws to a close with an overview of the next few years of the war and a fast forward summary of the lives of the main characters. The subplot involving a working class girl, Louie, is horribly patronizing – I was not sure if Louie was intended as comic relief in contrast to the well bred Mrs Rodney, but the tone of these scenes was unconvincing.

Bowen is a good stylist (for example, this sentence jumped out at me ““Vegetables of the politer kind packed the curves of crescent and the points of stars” (125)), although occasionally her writing is overblown. But the plot is weak – the reasons for Kelway spying for the Germans are unconvincing, and his behaviour when he is exposed – going to his family home for a long and pointless (and possibly intended as comic?) discussion about its sale is bizarre. The elusive Harrison is equally unconvincing. His interest in a relationship with Stella, for which he is prepared to turn a blind eye to Robert’s spying, surely another form of treason, is pursued in a very lacklustre way – having raised the question with her he then leaves her alone for several weeks to mull it over. Bowen seems to recognise this weakness when she writes:

“By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character “impossible” – each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.”

The Vintage classic edition I read this in quotes the Los Angeles Times as describing this novel as “intelligent noir” and that it “fills the reader’s heart with dread”. I thought it was entirely lacking in suspense or menace, but the fact that this is the best quote they could find about the novel probably tells its own story.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, 1726

I’ve written at length in this recent series of posts about the gap between the perception of novels in popular culture, and the books themselves. ‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ has probably suffered the most in this regard, or had the longest journey, in that the coruscating satire has been recast over the years as a children’s book. It is utterly futile to think of this transformation as being either a good or bad thing – it is just what has happened, and there is clearly a children’s book within the pages of this novel. But if it is seen as simply that, then what a shame.

‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ should be a set text for every GCSE student. It should be read by politics, history and literature undergraduates as well. It is a breathtakingly brave polemic. I last read the novel a few years ago, but rereading in recent days I was struck by the vigour of the satire, the ferocity of Swift’s anger. He tears his targets apart in a way that even today is rarely seen, when we think of ourselves as being much more open and challenging, but still pull our punches and avoid saying the unsay-able, steering away from taboo subjects in a way Swift fearlessly refuses to do.

No-one escapes his attention and criticism. The king of Brobdignag, the land of the giants, having heard Gulliver’s naively damning description of his home,says

“I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.” 

I don’t think anyone has ever captured the futility of political discourse more effectively than the paragraph describing the disputes between the Big- and Little-Endians.

“It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden”

That’s pretty much it, one short paragraph on the topic, but in these lines how much of human folly is portrayed? Political and religious disputes are exposed as the nonsense they are. Gulliver’s Travels is sometimes described as a narrow political satire in which direct parallels between contemporary events and characters and those in the novel are found. This I think places unnecessary constraints on the text – there is a universality to this portrayal of human folly.

If the satire in Lilliput and Brodbignag is relatively benign, the ferocity steps up a notch when Gulliver returns to sea once more (these are a series of separate voyages, between each of which Gulliver returns to England and visits his family, and is then tempted back to sea) and he meets the peoples of Laputa. I have used the phrase “fizzing with ideas” in previous blog entries about some other writers, but never has it been more appropriate – the ideas fly past with extraordinary speed, breathlessly, with little time to consider the wonderful invention and humour before the next is upon us. It’s not all relentless mocking of the absurdities of modern life – the chapters on the immortal men and women are quite haunting, and to this day have given me a different way of thinking about death. Yes, it’s that profound. In a ‘children’s book’.

It is really not until the extraordinary final chapters describing Gulliver’s time in the land of the Houyhnhnms where the  intensity of the satire reaches its full pitch. Ruled by a race of intelligent horses which possess all the virtues man lacks, these chapters principally consist of Gulliver describing England (and Europe) to his master. Simply through this description, and the horse’s occasional observation, the whole of society is damned. Take this description of the law for example:

“Judges… are picked out from the most dexterous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.”

Or international relations:

is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve.

Or finally, and possibly most damningly of all, for a country still priding itself on the expansion of its empire, we have this description of colonialism:

a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!”

Again this is just one paragraph, but is there anywhere a better indictment of imperialism?

It’s hardly surprising that this novel was published anonymously at first. If a modern version was published today the author would be vilified and almost certainly prosecuted. But the concept of a modern version of the text is probably nonsense – the universality of Swift’s themes means that this novel is quite timeless.

Just by way of a postscript, we think of 17th and 18th century novels as quite prudish, but that is completely wrong. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is surprisingly scatological. Gulliver is one of the few figures in fiction who needs to go to the toilet – in almost all books (and films) this simple universal need is politely ignored. This isn’t just for comic effect, as when he puts out the fire in Lilliput, funny though that is, but also as a part of making Gulliver a believable human character.

Finally, I bring you another delight from Amazon’s one star review selection, commenting on how easily Gulliver seems to recover from the various shipwrecks he endures: “It all seems too good to be true”.

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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – 1886

Stevenson’s ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” is an under-appreciated masterpiece. It’s a breathlessly fast paced story where the protagonist, Dr Jekyll, is dead (sorry, spoilers) halfway through the very short novel, and yet Stevenson manages to sustain the excitement until the big ‘reveal’ at the end. We now know of course that Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde, but it is still possible to imagine the excitement readers must have experienced on first finding this out, perhaps having worked it out for themselves a few pages earlier.

The novel uses a traditional framing device and a combination of diaries and other documents to provide some distance from the main action. Gabriel Utterson, a lawyer, is told by his cousin about an encounter some months ago, when he witnessed a sinister figure named Edward Hyde and a young girl accidentally bump into one another. Hyde trampled on the girl causing her some undefined harm. In a form of mob justice, Hyde was forced to pay £100 to avoid any scandal. He paid this on the spot fine with a cheque drawn on the account of Dr. Henry Jekyll, an old friend of Utterson. This tale reinforces Utterson’s fear that Jekyll is being blackmailed by Hyde – he has recently drawn his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary in case of his death or disappearance. Jekyll assures Utterson that there is nothing to worry about. Is there a suggestion that the reason Jekyll tolerates and funds Hyde is due to an ‘unnatural’ sexual relationship between the pair? This would explain the need to pay off witnesses to avoid a scandal, and also fits with the unspecified sins or vices that Jekyll admits to later in the novel when explaining his experiments.

Later, Hyde is implicated when a servant sees him beat a man to death with a heavy cane. Police find half of the cane, which is revealed to be one which Utterson himself gave to Jekyll. There is no trace of Hyde, and for a while Jekyll reverts to his former friendly manner. This cannot last, and soon Jekyll starts refusing to see any visitors. Then a mutual acquaintance of Jekyll and Utterson, Dr Lanyon, dies suddenly of shock. Before his death, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions that he should only open it after Jekyll’s death or his disappearance. It soon seems as if that time has come, because in the next chapter Jekyll’s butler, Poole, visits Utterson and explains that Jekyll has locked himself away in his laboratory for several weeks. They break into the laboratory to find the body of Hyde wearing Jekyll’s clothes and apparently dead from suicide.

They also find a letter from Jekyll to Utterson promising to explain the entire mystery. The suicide note and accompanying documents reveal that Lanyon’s death resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drinking a serum and, as a result of doing so, turning into Dr. Jekyll. The second letter explains that Jekyll, having previously indulged unstated vices found a way to transform himself and thereby indulge his vices without fear of detection. Unable to control the transformations he resolved to cease becoming Hyde, but it is too late – he is ever more helpless and trapped as the transformations increase in frequency and necessitate ever larger doses of the draught to reverse them. Eventually, one of the chemicals from which he had prepared the draught ran low. His ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll slowly vanished in consequence. He finally realises that he will soon become Hyde permanently.

I class Jekyll and Hyde, along with Dracula and Frankenstein, as the one of the three great horror novels of the 19th century. I appreciate that places me in the mainstream of critical reaction, but for some reason while the latter two works have been recognised as great works of fiction in their own rights, divorced from the industry of ‘inspired by’ films, television adaptation and novels they have generated, Jekyll and Hyde remains largely unread. Which is a pity, because it is genuinely scary. Hyde is a monster largely because he is so un-monstrous. The potion which Dr Jekyll discovers allows him to physically separate the good and evil parts of himself, but the Mr Hyde which emerges feels at first to be something quite positive. Outwardly he appears to be a normal man, although anyone seeing him is struck by his profoundly evil character:

“The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul.”

But this younger, lighter, happier personality comes with a catch:

“I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.” 

What I find fascinating about this novel is the way Stevenson brings together in one short story many of the prevailing big themes of the day: that science can unlock dangerous secrets, that people have dual or multiple personalities, and that some of our instincts are animalistic:

Jekyll experiments with splitting himself because he wants to find a way to indulge his appetite for vice with impunity. He releases a beast he cannot control:

“I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”

These vices are not specified, but sexually transmitted diseases, and their debilitating effect on men’s health, were a particular dread of the time. More specifically, the novel lends itself very conveniently to an allegorical reading of the need for homosexual men to live double lives. The Guardian noted in a review of a stage production a few years ago that:

“Even though Stevenson may not have intended leaving them, there are suggestive markers throughout the text: the suspected blackmail of Jekyll by his “young man”, his “favourite”; the “very pretty manner of politeness of Sir Danvers Carew” when approached in the street – terms that may have denoted forbidden liaisons to a Victorian readership. The hidden door by which he enters Jekyll’s house is the “back way”, even “the back passage”. It happens that the year of composition, 1885, was the year in which an amendment to an act of parliament made homosexual acts between men a criminal offence.”

Victorian society was still coming to terms with Darwin’s revolutionary idea that men had evolved from animals, and that it was from these origins that some of our animalist instincts could be traced. At the same time ideas around the subconscious were becoming more current, although yet to be formulated clearly by Freud in the twentieth century. Stevenson’s formulation of these ideas in ‘Dr Jekyll’ is arguably one of the earliest description of the divided consciousness:

“It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”

This is a fascinating, chilling and hugely influential book, horror for grown-ups, Stevenson’s best writing for adults.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, 1953

To be honest, everyone comes across a book from time to time that they struggle to complete, indeed to get started with. The plot never really seems to start, the characters are undefined and un-engaging, and keeping track of who is who and what has happened doesn’t really seem worth the effort. But one persists, out of stubbornness more than any expectation that all of a sudden the novel will transform into something more compelling. For me this is a relatively rare occurrence, but Bellow’s ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ was unfortunately one such book.

The novel follows the first few decades of the life of the eponymous hero growing up in Chicago in the 1920’s and 30’s. The title deliberately echoes the Mark Twain Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn novels of 80 years or so earlier. While Twain’s narratives were, superficially at least, quite innocent, Augie March is brought up in a very different world.

So why was this book such a challenge, to the extent that I actually felt a sense of relief when I finished? I identified a number of reasons. Firstly, Bellow’s sentence construction is often awkward, almost as if English were not his first language. To offer just two simple examples:

“By dumb concentration and notice-wooing struggle. The only way I could conceive, in my blood-loaded, picturesque amorousness“. (138)
“Thus Mrs Renling in her strenuous wand hacked-up way, and the whiteness that came from her compression into her intense purposes.(151)”

The intention, presumably, is to convey the fragmented nature of Augie’s internal narration. This works effectively at first, but after a while becomes wearing.

Secondly, the novel has no real plot. We follow Augie as he wanders aimlessly from job to job and relationship to relationship. Each situation involves the introduction of a large cast of characters – even on the penultimate page, more than 500 in, Bellow is still introducing new characters. Events are structured chronologically, but the episodic nature of the narrative means it doesn’t flow – I did this, then I did this, then I did something else.

Thirdly, Augie is not an engaging character. He is devoid of any insight into his own motivation – he just wanders through life. His personal attachments to other people are superficial – even his family members are discarded when he loses interest in them. His mother is left in a home for the blind, and he rarely visits her, and his disabled brother is dumped in an institution and he only visits him once in a period of several years. His love life is complicated and unconvincing.

If this was just a series of scenes of urban life in pre-war Chicago, the novel would have had a degree of integrity. But at one point Bellow seems to bore of this theme, and he takes Augie to Mexico to train an eagle to capture lizards. Yes, apparently the best way to catch lizards isn’t to trap theme, but to train an eagle to catch them. As a plot device this would be out of place in a Marx brothers film, but it gets worse, because out in Mexico Augie meets Leon Trotsky, on the run from Stalin’s secret police. Despite the major world events that occur over the span of the novel, from the end of Prohibition and the Great Depression, Augie barely notices them. Even though he has met Trotsky, his later assassination and death don’t merit a mention. The Second World War only intrudes as an interruption to Augie’s plans to finally settle down and marry.

So to summarise: no plot, boring characters, clumsy writing – yet Bellow won the Nobel prize for literature! I’m quite happy to admit I must be missing something. I’m going to guess it’s one or more of the following:

1. ‘The Adventures’ conforms strictly to the traditions of the picaresque novel, defined in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as:

“a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or low-born adventurer as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive. In its episodic structure the picaresque novel resembles the long, rambling romances of medieval chivalry, to which it provided the first realistic counterpart. Unlike the idealistic knight-errant hero, however, the picaro is a cynical and amoral rascal who, if given half a chance, would rather live by his wits than by honourable work. The picaro wanders about and has adventures among people from all social classes and professions, often just barely escaping punishment for his own lying, cheating, and stealing. He is a caste-less outsider who feels inwardly unrestrained by prevailing social codes and mores, and he conforms outwardly to them only when it serves his own ends. The picaro’s narrative becomes in effect an ironic or satirical survey of the hypocrisies and corruptions of society, while also offering the reader a rich mine of observations concerning people in low or humble walks of life.”

See what I mean?  Augie is an Everyman through whose eyes the reader can see his world, but his passage through it leaves few traces. So is ‘the Adventures’ a modern day American version of the classic picaresque novels such as ‘Don Quixote’? I think that is a sustainable interpretation, but I am not convinced.

2. ‘The Adventures’ also contains numerous classical references. These left me wondering if there were possibly parallels between Augie’s adventures and those of the classical characters he refers to, as happens in ‘Ulysses’. In the end I just didn’t care enough to try and find out.

3. The range and scope of the novel made me wonder whether this was Bellow’s application for the ‘Great American Novel’ competition. This scepticism wasn’t helped by the quote from Martin Amis on the back cover claiming “‘The Adventures of Augie March’ is the Great American Novel. Search no more.” There are some explicit references to other candidates in that competition, now closed of course. Does this description of Augie’s brother Simon’s spending habits ring any bells?:

‘From the barbershop we’d go to Field’s to by him a dozen or so shirts, imported Italian underclothes or slacks or shoes, all things of which he already had a surplus; he showed me drawers, closets, shelves full, and still kept buying’ (224)

I noted down several quotes from this novel during the week or so that it took to complete, but the one I should have listened to was Bellow’s advice, in Augie’s voice:

“I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn’t let themselves be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow” (206)

This novel didn’t let itself be read with fervour, and even though I didn’t throw it aside, no-one could surely have blamed me if I had.

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20th century Literature, A Month in the Country, Book review, J L Carr, novella, Penguin Modern Classics

A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr, 1980

‘A Month in the Country‘ is an exquisite novella, short-listed on publication for the Booker prize back in 1980 at a time when they weren’t so awkward about word-count (this runs to barely 80 pages), and turned into a film with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth which has its own, fascinating story. Carr only published a handful of short novels in his life, and is a wrongly neglected novelist – so much so that I am going to put him on my alternative ‘Best novels written in English’ list.

‘A Month in the Country‘ is narrated by Tom Birkin, and tells of the summer (the pedant in me can’t resist pointing out that the events of the novel take place over the course of the whole summer, not just one month – would ‘A Summer in the Country’ have been a worse title?) of 1920. Back from the horrors of the First World War, Birkin has been commissioned to restore a mural, his rather specialist profession, as part of the whimsical legacy of a local landowner, Miss Adelaide Hebron. He spends his days on the scaffolding within the church, slowly uncovering and restoring the mural depicting Judgment day. His nights are spent in the belfry. The slow, quiet work is in some ways a therapeutic part of his recovery from a bad case of shell shock. He is accompanied by a succession of local figures who come to visit and check on his progress, interested in the curiosity of a visitor to the sleepy Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. He also has a companion of sorts in Charles Moon, employed as part of the same legacy to try to find the grave of one of Miss Hebron’s ancestors, buried outside the churchyard according to legend.

This is one of those deceptive novels where on the surface little happens, but when you look back there is in fact a huge amount of incident, romance, drama, and superbly rich characterisation. Carr captures the wonder of an English summer with wonderful economy – you can almost hear the bees lazily buzzing as Birkin cycles to church, or chats to Moon over another cup of tea.

Ah, those days…for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young.

The healing process Birkin goes through as he restores the mural in the eaves of the church has another parallel in the healing the country experiences from the war. Moon, camping in the field next to the church in a dugout reminiscent of the trenches, has his own healing processes to go through. He has quickly identified the location of the grave he has been commissioned to find, but strings out his time in Oxgodby exploring the site of a Saxon basilica. Birkin is slowly engaged in the life of the local community, umpiring cricket matches and even taking a service at a nearby chapel. All the while his understated romance with the vicar’s wife is blooming – even though there is little to the relationship beyond a few chaste glances and words. He understands that her marriage is, like his own, mistaken and unhappy, and the climax of the novel is reached when he has the opportunity to reveal his feelings, certain they will be reciprocated. The moment agonisingly passes, and once gone cannot be recaptured.

I’ve not really even started to unravel the complexity and beauty of this exceptionally well-written, delicately drawn novel. I have never read anything that captures so well the sense of loss:

“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.”

Wonderful.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, American literature, Book review, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, 1963

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”.

Is there a better opening line to a novel? It wasn’t until towards the end of this book, when the narrator, Esther Greenwood, has electro-convulsive therapy as part of her treatment for severe depression, and submits to it “like a person coolly resigned to execution” (203) that I was able to join the dots – she sees what happens to her as similar to what happened to the Rosenbergs. Note also that “they electrocuted the Rosenbergs” not “the Rosenbergs were electrocuted” – suggesting the existence of a shadowy and malevolent but wholly real external force that can take people’s lives. Not only does Esther not know what she is doing in New York, but as the novel develops it becomes apparent that her confusion is much deeper rooted.

Rarely has an opening sentence more brilliantly foreshadowed the events of the novel, while at the same time setting the tone and fixing the events in time and place.

Sadly it is now not possible, if it ever was, to separate any reading of ‘The Bell Jar’ from one’s knowledge of Plath’s own life (and death). She committed suicide a few weeks after ‘The Bell Jar’ was published under a pseudonym. The novel is largely autobiographical, and horribly foreshadows, even predicts, her final days. I don’t know whether this extraordinary book is an extended suicide note, or a cry for help – but I do know that I can’t remember reading a sadder novel. The ending, where Esther’s ECT seems to have been successful, and she finally starts to recover from her illness, is a false dawn all the sadder in the context of Plath’s death.

The novel opens with Esther enjoying something of an adventure, on a work-placement with a magazine in New York. She is academically successful, has enjoyed lots of advantages in life, and seems to have the world at her feet. She has not yet mastered the art of developing relationships with men, but is starting to experiment with her new found freedom. There are some aspects of life she finds hard – men consistently try to bully her, particularly when it comes to sex, and while she stands up for herself this is not an aspect of her life she is comfortable with. She doesn’t bond easily with the other women in her lodgings, and in the background is the loss of her German father when she was nine (Plath lost her German father when she was eight).

At first she appears to be in control, and the depression that comes to dominate her life is not immediately apparent. However, subconsciously, the signs are already there. Death, murder, suicide, and objects associated with death, constantly crowd her thoughts:

A lumpy bed is “shrouded by a thin white spread” (86); a silver lighter is “in the shape of a bullet.” (103), as is Doctor Gordon’s pencil “like a slim, silver bullet” (129); a mattress falls across Esther “like a tombstone” (119); a bath tub is “coffin-shaped” (18) and a telephone sits “dumb as a death’s head” (17).

The language of death pops uninvited, and unnoticed, into Esther’s mind all the time, even when there is no apparent connection with the subject. Death is everywhere:

“My penalty was the long, dead walk from the frosted glass doors of the Amazon” (95)

“Pretend you are drowning’.” (103)

“I felt like a hole in the ground” (15)

“At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.”(106)

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off” (107)

“A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death” (109)

“I cracked open a peanut from the ten cent bag I had bought to feed the pigeons, and ate it. It tasted dead, like a bit of old tree bark”. (131)

(On her mother’s snoring) “The piggish noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed to me that the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands” (119)

Finally, these thoughts cannot be resisted, and the crisis point is reached.

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower” (92)

From this point Esther plans to kill herself, and these thoughts dominate her waking hours. She plans her suicide carefully, and her inverted thinking is reflected in the language she uses to discuss these plans:

(Of the Japanese) “They disembowelled themselves when anything went wrong” (132)

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit the bottom. I thought seven storeys must be a safe distance”. (131)

Note the use of the word safe, meaning here to end in certain death, the complete opposite of its usual meaning.

Esther’s suicide attempts lead to her being sectioned. She dreads the ECT, even though finally it appears to have helped, if only temporarily. She describes her feelings during psychiatric analysis:

“I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying “Ah!” in an encouraging way, and then I would find words to tell him how I was scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn’t sleep, and why I couldn’t read and why I couldn’t eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.” (123/4)

So the father figure she is hoping for fails to appear. Equally, the young men in her life are not substitute fathers, failing to care for her.

This isn’t just a book about mental illness and suicide. It’s about growing up, about the way men behave towards women, it is about literature, and reading, and writing, and so much more. It is deeply sad, and provides an insight into the thoughts of a suicidal depressive who ultimately can’t understand her own illness, just wants it to end. In many ways it is a very difficult, challenging novel, and anyone in a similar position to Plath would fit little comfort in it. My edition carries a quotation from Joyce Carol Oates “A near perfect work of art”, and just this once I agree.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, At Swim-Two-Birds, Book review, Flann O'Brien, Irish literature

At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien – 1939

‘At Swim-Two-Birds‘ is quite unlike any other novel I have ever read. On the whole that is a good thing, but it also means that it can be a challenging, almost impossible read. Let’s start with a plot summary, which I have borrowed direct from Wikipedia:

At Swim-Two-Birds presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the Pooka MacPhellimey, “a member of the devil class”. The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student’s creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns. The third consists of the student’s adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney.

In the autobiographical frame story, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinking stout with his college friends, lying in bed and working on his book, than he does going to class.

The stories that the student is writing become intertwined with each other. John Furriskey befriends two of Trellis’s other characters, Lamont and Shanahan. They become resentful of Trellis’s control over their destinies, and manage to drug him so that he will spend more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives rather than be ruled by the lurid plots of his novels. Meanwhile, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont (Antony Lamont’s sister) in order that Furriskey might seduce and betray her, but “blinded by her beauty” Trellis assaults her himself. Sheila gives birth to a child named Orlick, who is born as a polite and articulate young man with a gift for writing fiction. The entire group of Trellis’s characters, by now including Finn, Sweeney, the urbane Pooka and an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy , convenes in Trellis’s Red Swan Hotel where they devise a way to overthrow their author. Encouraged by the others, Orlick starts writing a novel about his father in which Trellis is tried by his own creations, found guilty and viciously tortured. Just as Orlick’s novel is about to climax with Trellis’ death, the college student passes his exams and At Swim-Two-Birds ends.

The reason why I have exceptionally quoted this plot summary at such length is to give you some idea of the labyrinthine complexity of the plot. I struggled with following the action of the narrative until I came across this summary (after extensive research, of course) and used it as a crib sheet to help me follow things. I have no idea what this says about me as a reader, but I recommend it as an approach for anyone else who struggles as I did. Of course the other point that jumps off the page from this precis is the bizarre, post-modernist nature of the text. Characters writing their own endings and launching attacks on their authors is something no-one (that I know of) had done before O’Brien, certainly not in novel format, and it still remains outside the normal realms of fiction, belonging more to comedy or comic books.

The third reason why the novel presents challenges to the reader brought up on traditional narrative is the innovative use of found texts. I’ve not been able to establish precisely which parts of the novel were copied from other texts in ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’, other than the letter from a tipster recommending a sure fire winner, but I suspect the section providing random ‘useful’ facts during Trellis’s trial, the summary of the events of the poem ‘The Shipwreck’ (pages 201-211) and the long list of ‘flowers and plants rarely mentioned in ordinary conversation’ on page 192 are examples. The latter two instances are dropped into the text almost entirely at random with little or no contextual reason for their use. The use of complex Irish names and place names added yet another layer of difficulty for this reader, and if you think I am exaggerating the point, try this:

“Sweet to me your voice, said Caolcrodha Mac Morna, brother to sweet-worded sweet-toothed Goll from Sliabh Riabhach and Brosnacha Bladhma, relate then the attributes that are to Finn’s people.”

Most of the humour in the novel derives from O’Brien’s surreal approach to his subject matter, such as it is. The closest thing I can compare it to is listening to a drunk telling you a long and unstructured story, where no-one behaves rationally, and where he keeps forgetting what he was telling you. Occasionally glimmers of sense can be perceived, but this never lasts long and we are soon back in old Ireland, with the Pooka speculating on whether his wife is a kangaroo, or whether the invisible fairy in his pocket is planning to set it on fire.

This certainly all adds up to an unusual, even unique novel.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger, 1951

Three things I didn’t notice about ‘Catcher in the Rye’ when I first read it as a teenager:

a) Holden Caulfield, the novel’s 16 year old narrator, is seriously rich. He attends a private boarding school in New Jersey, from which he has just been expelled. His family live in an apartment building close to Central Park which is large enough (the apartment, not the park) for them to have a live-in house-maid. During the 48 hours or so of the novel’s span he spends money like water, on hotels, cabs everywhere, drinks, and a prostitute. How could I have missed this first time round, seeing him as a fairly normal, typicla teenager. I think the simple reason is that we see the events of the novel through Holden’s eyes, and he is not aware of how privileged and prosperous he is – for him, it is normal to be able to afford all these things.

b) Holden hates pretty much everything. Actors. Hotels. Phonys. People who repeat themselves. Inexpensive looking suitcases. People who repeat themselves.

“I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always….” (page 141)

Holden’s anger is random – he snarls at anything that crosses his path, but at exactly the same time tries to befriend anyone he can.

c) Holden is quite obviously clinically depressed. He is unable to sleep, he cries for no particular reason, he is unable to concentrate, and he is full of inarticulate rage against the world. Holden may have become, as described by Wikipedia, as “an icon for teenage rebellion and angst”, but that’s really a case of projection – Holden doesn’t really rebel against anything; he is just extraordinarily lonely and upset. He desperately tries to make connections with anyone who will talk to him, from taxi drivers to Salvation Army nuns, (not that the Salvation Army has nuns) and ten year-olds in the park.

By the end of the novel, Holden is hospitalised. He talks in the introduction about becoming “run-down” and coming “here” without saying explicitly where here is. However, on the final page, he mentions “how I got sick” and “this one psychoanalyst guy they have here”.

So, we have someone who is prosperous and in a loving family, with no material wants. He hates virtually everything he comes across, however trivial or inoffensive they might be. He is depressed. How can that be a simply case of teenage angst, something he will grow out of? For me, rereading ‘Catcher’ it is quite obvious that Holden has not recovered from the death of his brother a few years earlier. It is reasonable to assume that showing grief would have been frowned upon by his Waspish family. There’s no reference to any counselling or other support – instead he is simply sent away to boarding school, separating him from his remaining siblings. He still mourns for his brother, thinks about him a lot, and refers to him in the present tense in his internal monologue, but doesn’t speak about him to anyone, not even his little sister Phoebe.

‘Catcher’ is a novel much loved by teenage readers. Holden seems to speak to them in a way like few other characters in literature. He was, arguably, the first authentic teenager in literature. Coming back to the novel several decades later the authenticity of that voice is lost. In trying to establish whether this reaction was simply personal to me, or something wider, I scrolled through some Amazon (UK) reviews of the novel. One comment from a perceptive reviewer jumped out at me:

“Reading it – and To Kill A Mockingbird, which is the only book that regularly beats it in polls – has been a formative influence for generations of American adolescents, to the point at which nostalgia for that time of life may impose a filter between the older reader and any objective assessment. Even so, it’s striking how many find that it can’t be reread later in life with the same admiration.”

That struck a chord – the novel is often read at a point in the life of readers when they can identify with Holden, not because of his wealth, his illness, or his loss, but because he is a teenager angry with the world. As a more mature reader we see the novel’s faults, the absence of any plot and the various implausibilities in terms of Holden’s age, an immature 16 who still gets served in bars and clubs.  We also see Holden as the distressed young man he is rather than a voice of rebellion. It is, of course, one of the strengths of the novel that is can appeal to different types of readers in very different ways.

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