Category Archives: Book review

20th century Literature, Book review, G K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

The Man who was Thursday by G K Chesterton, 1908

What a great title for a novel. Set in the early years of the 20th century, ‘The Man who was Thursday’ is subtitled ‘A Nightmare’, which gives a clue to the novel’s eventual denouement. Gabriel Syme, a newly recruited, not to say unusual police detective, infiltrates a gang of anarchists, and within hours has secured a place on their European Council. The council has seven members, each with a code name derived from the days of the week. The purpose of these code names is not immediately apparent, as each is also known by their actual names, and the council operates openly ‘in plain sight’, on the basis that this is the best form of disguise. A fairly breathless adventure ensues in which each council member is steadily exposed by Syme as fellow police officers.

I was already aware of the novel’s plot big ‘twist’, so I can’t be sure at what point I would have worked it out. I doubt it would have taken long. Each member has their own ‘reveal’ scene, although the surprise fades quickly, and the “Oh, by the way, I’m a policeman not an anarchist as well” scene quickly becomes the routine.

 

Chesterton challenges the reader to work out whether this is a naturalistic detective novel or not. The surreal elements are introduced quite early on – the back-street pub Syme is taken to by Gregory, keen to demonstrate the authenticity of his belief in anarchy, leads into a mysterious underground den of London anarchists, packed with weaponry and bombs. Anarchists were considered a real threat in early 20th century Europe, it being more of a catch-all term for revolutionary than it is today, and so even though the world Syme is introduced into has fantastical elements, it is unclear at first whether the reader is expected to treat them as simply part of an adventure story. Chesterton exploits this ambiguity throughout the novel – he constantly introduces mysterious, seemingly supernatural aspects into the narrative, only to quickly provide a naturalistic explanation. Syme duels with one of his council members, cutting him several times with an open blade, but does not draw blood. It is quickly revealed that this is because he is wearing a number of prosthetics, not least a false nose, which he removes to reveal – cure fanfare – yet another London policeman. Syme is earlier followed through London at breakneck speed by an old man who can hardly walk – and yes, the old man is revealed soon thereafter as an athletic policeman in disguise.

The nightmarish intensity of the novel accelerates as it draws to a climax, in some quite astonishingly surreal scenes. Naturalism is abandoned as Sunday, the leader of the Council, leads his gang, now all revealed as policemen, on a chase through the streets of London, partly on an elephant, partly by hot air balloon, throwing surreal comic notes into their path (“Fly at once. The truth about your trouser stretchers is known. – A FRIEND”) as he goes – into the countryside. The chase ends in a masked fancy dress ball. Christian allegory takes centre stage, and the somewhat bemused reader leans that Sunday’s disguise mirrors that of the novel itself – it never was a detective story, but a dream, a nightmare, all along.

I am sure I am not alone in finding this novel strangely discomforting. Chesterton wrote detective fiction – the Father Brown stories – and so the expectation that ‘Thursday’ would be more of the same, a reworking of Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ with a lighter tone, is completely subverted by the revelation that the novel is a well-disguised religious allegory all along. The joke is a clever one, although whether it is clever enough for me to want to pursue Chesterton further is one I have yet to decide. The best I can say for now following a few days reflection on having finished the novel is that my disappointment at not having read the detective novel I expected has abated, and I have reappraised ‘The Man who was Thursday’. It may not be a great detective story, but it is quite an intelligent novel, and while religious allegories are something I can quickly have too much of, it is still good for me to have my expectations subverted once in a while.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, 1980

Among the various reasons for keeping this blog, the one I keep coming back to is to help me remember. I doubt if it is just me who forgets the detail of a novel, then the main events and protagonists, and finally come to doubt whether I have even read it at all. Which is why it is important that I write carefully about Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Housekeeping’, because otherwise there is not a chance in hell of me remembering it in a few months time.

The novel is narrated by Ruthie, and tells of the events of her childhood. Orphaned by the suicide of her mother she is brought up with her sister Lucille by their grandmother, then two elderly great-aunts, and finally by her aunt Sylvie. It is never stated directly, but it is fairly evident that Sylvie is mentally disturbed – she neglects the children, fills the house with rubbish and cats, and can often be found staring out into space. Housekeeping, the semi-ironic title, is not something that occurs to her, and even in the broader sense she struggles to keep a house for the girls, the younger of whom escapes to live with a teacher as soon as she is able. Finally, after Ruthie’s neglect becomes inescapable, and it appears likely she is going to be taken into care. To avoid this she and Sylvie run away, and at the novel’s close we are told they continue to live the rootless life of transients.

‘Housekeeping’ is one of those novels where the sense of place is vital. The isolated American town of Fingerbone (admittedly a fine name for a town) is settled next to a large lake, crossed by a railway bridge. From said bridge and into said lake a train crashed, carrying with it Ruthie’s grandfather, setting in chain the events that lead to this story, and providing a backdrop for the narrative itself. Think ‘Twin Peaks’ without the murder or (some of) the craziness. It always seems to be bitterly cold down in Fingerbone, and the chill and damp coming off the lake exudes from the pages.

Robinson left it almost another twenty-five years after publishing ‘Housekeeping’ to publish another novel, but it cannot have been because of the reception of this her first, prize-winning attempt. In his Guardian review Robert McCrum goes to far to say, surely in an act of wild over-exaggeration, that Robinson introduces a “new, timeless, and utterly distinctive voice into the magical polyphony of the American novel”. While she can certainly craft an image – for example  “watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the lenght of the lake” this restraint and economy is often absent. At times the writing is extraordinarily over-written, as here:

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”

Does it really? Or is this the triumph of style over substance, attractive to literature prize-juries but simply not that interesting?

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, American literature, Book review, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Huck Finn, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, 1884/5

Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn‘ follows chronologically the earlier ‘Tom Sawyer’, but has a much darker, more adult tone. Huck is the novel’s first person narrator, and has a primitive, naive view of the world which contrasts with that of the reader, and provides much of the humour and insight of the novel. Huck is dirt poor, uneducated, and more than a little feral. His mother is long dead, and his father is an abusive alcoholic who treats Huck like a slave. To escape his father’s abuse he runs away – he fakes his own death, steals a boat, and sails off down the Mississippi, looking for somewhere to hide. The parallels between Huck and Jim, the escaped slave he meets and befriends, are done with a light touch – Huck has almost no self pity, and doesn’t equate his position with that of Jim. It is not so much that he believes himself superior to Jim, but that his awareness of Jim’s role as a slave, as property, with no rights whatsoever, is rarely challenged.

Jim and Huck sail down river, having various adventures. They meet a family engaged in a bitter feud with some neighbours (to be precise Huck meets the family, Jim remains hidden through these chapters) just at the point where the feud erupts into deadly violence. They meet two con-artists and become embroiled in some of their scams. Eventually Jim is captured and imprisoned, and in some of the final chapters of the novel which even its most ardent supporters recognise are misconceived, Tom Sawyer is reintroduced and the children’s book, Just-William style of the earlier novel is reimposed, before a resolution in which Jim is freed.

‘Huck Finn’ is lauded as a masterpiece of American primitive literature. Twain certainly captures the scenes of living on the river vividly. But the whole impact of the otherwise complex and subtle novel was spoiled for me by the constant and repetitive use of the n-word. The word is used casually and in most cases without vicious intent, and no doubt was historically accurate. Although the novel was published in the UK in 1884, and the US the following year, the setting of the novel is some 20 or so years earlier, when slavery in the South (having been abolished across Northern states as early as 1804) was still in force. Abolition and the free state are mentioned as background, but the attempt to take Jim to freedom is abandoned easily. Huck’s presentation of slavery is very matter of fact – he reports Jim’s distress that his wife and children have been sold to another owner – but there is little or no empathy, nor indeed recognition of their shared misfortune. All the black people in the novel are portrayed as caricatures – they speak an exaggerated form of English, rendered phonetically thus:

“But it’s awluz jis’ so; people dat’s sot, stays sot; dey won’t look into noth’n’en fine it out f’r deyselves, en when you fine it out en tell um ’bout it, dey doan’ b’lieve you.”

They are all also hugely superstitious, frightened of ghosts and witches, and are extremely easy to tease or fool, with a child-like innocence or naivety. Huck and Tom have no hesitation in exploiting this gullibility for their own amusement.

As Huck gets to know Jim, his admirable qualities emerge. He is kind, faithful, and patient. He sacrifices his freedom for Tom’s welfare, and suffers uncomplainingly the many injustices placed upon him. Twain’s portrait is generally sympathetic, despite his use of many of the ‘Uncle Tom’ cliches of the time. But this emphatically isn’t an anti-slavery novel – that battle had been won years earlier after the Civil War. Equally it doesn’t present the case for civil rights for emancipated slaves or opposition to racism – its setting means that is simply not an issue. So at best the presentation of the issue of slavery in ‘Huck Finn’ is ambiguous.

Ultimately it is the use of the n-word that defaced this book for me. Finn is a charming and thoughful narrator, and his insights into his world are at times witty and interesting. But imagine (say) ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with a foul swear word used casually by the characters every other page or so. The values of the novel would remain, its wit and intelligence, the clever characterisation, and so on, but it would be really hard to prevent the use of the distressing language from spoiling one’s appreciation of these aspects of the novel, wouldn’t it? I am not suggesting bowdlerising this novel, although such things have been done, but I doubt it would prevent readers from enjoying it if alternative language was used.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, children's literature, Kenneth Graeme, Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graeme – 1908

It is an incredibly long time since I last read ‘The Wind in the Willows’, and I returned to it with some nervousness – would it have retained its wit and charm? Unsurprisingly, it is one of those novels which contains depths unnoticed in earlier reads. It is simply wonderful, and if you have a couple of hours spare there are few ways of spending them that would be more rewarding than on the riverbank with Ratty, Mole, Toad, and Badger.

In an interesting article in the Guardian books column back in 2009, ‘Wild Waters are upon us’, Rosemary Hill observed that ‘The Wind in the Willows’ was written within a few years of Beatrix Potter’s ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’, E.Nesbit’s ‘The Railway Children’, and J.M.Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’. Together she argues, very persuasively, these children’s stories came to define the Edwardian Era, “as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine“, in contrast to the developments in the real world, “a decade of social discontent and growing international tension, when the cracks in the British Empire began to show“. This novel captures brilliant a world of largely suburban contentment – the animals co-exist quite comfortably with the human world, all except perhaps Mr Toad, and their occupations – mainly messing about on boats – are those of middle class people with time on their hands. If ‘Willows’ creates a lost Edwardian idyll, rather than portraying it, the novel is however quite clear that this world is under threat, from development, urbanisation, and not least the dreaded car. The car must have been a rare and slightly frightening sight in 1908, but the way Graeme captures the petrol-head obsession of Toad has close parallels to the car worship of today.

Graeme’s wonderful conceit in ‘Willows’ was to anthropomorphise his characters, but in a very fluid way. At times they are real animals, and in the edition I read on the kindle the illustrations show them as lifelike, to scale creatures. At other times they are human scale. They have human character traits, but also at other times behave like the animals they are, subject to instincts and urges which nevertheless find an echo in the reader. The cast of characters is hugely strong and well defined; we all know a Ratty, Mole, or Badger, let alone a Toad. The supporting cast of characters is equally well sketched in, so we feel great affection for Otter, for example, or his son, Portly. The Chief Weasel only gets a few lines but that was enough for A.A. Milne to give him a much larger part in the stage version, ‘Toad of Toad Hall’. The narrative is also told with a striking economy – there are only two pages between Toad’s escape from his friends at Toad Hall, and the magistrate passing sentence, “twelve months for the theft…, three years for the furious driving, which is lenient, and fifteen years for the cheek“.


Part of my nervousness about returning to ‘Willows’ lay in the way the Wild Wood and its inhabitants are handled. It is ‘other’ – and can be read as anything alien to the comfortable life of Ratty and company, even if it is home to Badger. At one point the narrator describes it as “low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea“. The alliteration is marvellous, but the point is made – the wild-wooders are like foreigners, tribal natives, dark and threatening. It is like the areas on maps marked ‘here be dragons’.  The insurrection of the wild-wooders, numerous and disrespectful to their betters, and at times actually threatening, seemed to me to be a perfect model for the class struggles of the period. The working class are organising and asking why they have to live lives of poverty and drudge, while the middle classes mess around in boats, doing very little. Their revolution, when it comes, is quickly squashed, and it is made clear they have learnt their place, tugging on their forelocks when the squires of the manor pass by. This of course was wishful thinking – the class problems of 20th century Britain were not as easily resolved as a clip around the ear. However I think the handling of this paradigm does throw a light on the complacent attitude of many to the rise of the organised working class in the early years of the 20th century.

I was equally nervous about the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ chapter, that strange, surreal story where Ratty and Mole go searching for Otter’s lost son, Portly, and meet him safe in the arms of Pan. Yes, Pan. Mole sees “the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arms that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward“. Pan saves Portly and returns him to his friends, then wipes their memories, Men in Black fashion. It’s still a really strange, slightly homo-erotic chapter. I can only assume Graeme was trying to introduce the idea that the animals have their own spirituality, their own God, but this must have opened up some really difficult lines of thought for God-fearing Edwardians only just coming to terms with Darwinism and their links with the animal kingdom.

The thing that struck me for the first time on this reading was in relation to the treatment of Toad by his friends when they decide they cannot stand by and see him wreck his life by his addiction to fast cars. The way this is described is almost identical to a modern intervention into the life of a drug addict. His friends sit him down and clearly explain the problem. They describe the waste of money on his addiction, the “regrettable incidents with the police“, and the “weeks in hospital, being ordered about by female nurses“. When he rejects their help they restrain him, keep him under close watch – “he must never be left an instant unguarded. We shall have to take it in turns to be with him, till the poison has worked itself out of his system”. (page 61). Toad has “violent paroxysms” makes “uncouth and ghastly noises“, and lies “prostrate amidst the ruins of chairs” – is not this a wonderfully accurate description of someone going ‘cold turkey’.

Finally, to end on a joke, which made me laugh out loud. Toad is in the most liberal dungeon in the country, chatting to the kindly daughter of the warder. She is trying to explain her escape plan, and says:

“I have an aunt who is a washerwoman”,

to which Toad graciously and affably replies

“There, there, …never mind; think no more about it. I have several aunts who ought to be washerwomen”.

Could Bertie Wooster have said it better?

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20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Vonnegut

Mother Knight – Kurt Vonnegut – 1966

Released a few years before ‘Slaughterhouse 5’, ‘Mother Knight’ is probably best seen as a companion piece to that work. In some ways a more conventional narrative, it tells in diary form the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr, an American, who moved to Germany in 1923 as a child, and became a well-known playwright. Married to a German woman, he is approached by an American shortly before the second world war starts, and asked to stay in Germany and become a spy for the Americans. This he does, reluctantly, because in order to maintain his cover he has to become an enthusiastic propagandist for the Nazis. As he observes “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” – pretending to be a Nazi for so long corrupts his soul, and he finds it hard to argue with or oppose the Americans he meets later in life who hate him, as a symbol and public face of the Nazis.

I don’t know if there was a real-life American equivalent of Campbell, but the obvious English parallel is with William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, who must surely have provided some inspiration for the novel, even if unlike Campbell, Joyce remained an unrepentant Nazi.

The reader is left in doubt throughout the novel whether his defence – that he was acting as a spy – is genuine. He presents no evidence in support of it, and the suggestion that he was conveying messages in his broadcasts through coughs and hesitations is implausible, to say the least. However, the final dénouement reveals his story – his defence – was actually true all along. By then it is too late for Campbell, having lost everything he values he passes his own sentence on himself.

Vonnegut is novelist of ideas – he throws them around casually, sometimes following them through, but often discarding them. This makes ‘Mother Knight’ a surprisingly easy and enjoyable read – the cast of characters was entertaining, including some cutting portraits of American Nazis, and the shifts of mood from comedy to black farce worked well. It’s also quite a brave novel – it addresses serious themes and topics such as the holocaust, the rise of fascism, and nationalism. The central character is perhaps hard to like – as narrator of his own story we should normally be sympathetic to him – we understand his motivation, even when what he does is questionable. Campbell never attempts to justify his actions in the war, but he is not prepare to accept some of the lazy condemnation thrown at him which has parallels with the way opponents of the Nazis were treated (the stealing of the light bulbs for example). Just to illustrate the point, there is a brief discussion of nationalism which quite bravely in post-McCarthy America rejects the whole concept of being proud of one’s country:

“You hate America, don’t you?’
That would be as silly as loving it,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”

You can see Vonnegut warming up for ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ here, although without some of the surrealist components of the later novel. I also caught some echoes of ‘Lolita’ as well – both novels being the posthumous prison diary of someone reviled by society. I will definitely be returning to Vonnegut – he writes well, entertainingly, is refreshing unstuffy and unpretentious, but at the same time deals with serious themes. Recommended.

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Book review

An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro – 1986

This novel addresses what most be one of the most difficult issues a country has to ever face – how to come to terms with overwhelming military defeat. For Japan, that defeat was all the more painful because its involvement in World War 2 was completely avoidable; and the end of the war, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so shocking and final. Ishiguro’s approach to this subject is to walk slowly round it, quietly approaching and then stepping quickly away as soon as the subject becomes too raw.

I am being oblique myself, so let’s explain. The narrator is a painter, Masuji Ono. He has lost a son and a wife in the war, but his two daughters survived. One is married, one going through the complex engagement process used by some Japanese families at the time (and for all I know is still in use). The time structure used in the novel is complex; although each section is dated, giving the reader a misleading reassurance as to the date of the events of that part of the novel, Ono’s account wanders across time, gradually revealing details of his career as a painter. Discouraged by his father from becoming a painter, he runs away from home, and becomes an artist of the floating world – a particular genre of art in Japanese culture. Very slowly Ono reveals his involvement in the rise of Japanese nationalism, and his subsequent disgrace and the rejection of his values by the new, post-war generation. This reveal takes the whole of the story arc, and even then one is left with the distinct impression that we have only been shown a small part of the story.

Ono is a reflective character – he is certainly a deeply flawed narrator, as one would expect, but he is not delusional – he knows that his involvement in Japanese nationalism, painting pictures encouraging the expansion of the empire, was wrong, although the extent of that recognition is unclear: at one point he admits “There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life”, although this is more of a tactical admission than a confession. Ono’s grandson plays an important part in the narrative – he is a really brattish, unpleasant little eight year old, who is encouraged (by his grandfather) to believe that his gender gives him authority over his mother.

There is a profoundly hesitant, tentative feel to the novel. Ono tiptoes around his story, rarely revealing much, and constantly admitting that his recollection may be flawed, The reader is given enough information to piece together the outlines of his story, but only through hints and only rarely through actual events – at one point we are shown him visiting the house of one of his students, who he has reported for anti-nationalist feeling, and it is clear that the authorities reaction has been extreme – we found out earlier that the student was imprisoned for a long time, and apparently tortured. Ono doesn’t understand, or refuses to understand, his responsibility for this situation.

Ishiguro is clearly a writer of some considerable skill – the novel is quite deliberately like a delicate Japanese watercolour, done with great finesse. But the characters – other than Ono himself – are only tentatively drawn – we only see them through Ono’s eyes, and he doesn’t trouble to sketch them in any detail. The language is equally delicate and riven with hesitation, again quite deliberately, giving a very authentic flavour to the narrative, but leaving the reader a little bit detached and remote – the speeches are overly polite, and you need to listen carefully to the subtext to understand what the speakers are really saying, even if the narrator usually misses the point.

Japan clearly went through a huge, if self-imposed trauma before, during and after the Second World War. The price paid was enormous, and understanding how that come to happen is important. Ishiguro gives us one witness’s flawed account, but it is very much that of someone who had only a small, marginal involvement in the tragedy, and I am not sure that it tells enough of the story to be of any value. The book ends without any big reveal, and so does this review.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth taylor. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, 1971

I confess I had never heard of Elizabeth Taylor before her appearance in the Guardian best 100 novels in English list. One of the hope-for benefits of working through this list was the discovery of some hidden gems, a writer whose back catalogue would open up to exploration. Having now read the clumsily titled and thinly written ‘Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont’ I know why she is so unknown – her inclusion on this list is puzzling, when you consider the authors such as Tolkien and Rowling who missed the cut. There’s nothing wrong with ‘Mrs Palfrey’ as a novel, and if you try hard you can find some features of interest – but little that will occupy you for long.

Laura Palfrey who in Taylor’s somewhat spiteful description ““would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag”, is recently widowed. She arrives at the Claremont hotel in London, one rainy Sunday in January. The novel immediately strikes a false note – the taxi driver is unfamiliar with the hotel. Taylor is telling the reader that the hotel is obscure and forgotten, like Mrs Palfrey herself, but she surely under-estimates London cabbies? After years as a colonial ex-patriot wife she faces the fact of her isolation, and the inevitability of decline and death.
There is a strangely dated air to both the Claremont and the novel itself. Although published in 1971 the setting is firmly in the sixties, with references to the Beatles and hair-length being a cause for disproportionate anger in the elderly. At one point, a young man refers to his girlfriend as a “bird”. (Quite genuinely, for a split second I took this as a reference to him having bought himself a parrot or canary, so dated is this slang). In fact, although the setting is the 60’s this novel could easily have been published several decades earlier with only minor edits. Mrs Palfrey’s back story is strangely blank – while we know her husband was in a colonial role in Burma, that would have ended in the late 1940’s; we aren’t told when or how he died, where Mrs Palfrey lived after that, or much about her strange decision to move away from her daughter in Scotland to the most expensive city in the country, rather than the more sedate and welcoming south coast, for example.
The Claremont becomes in the words of the Guardian’s reviewer “a genteel antechamber to oblivion”. Mrs Palfrey and her fellow long term inhabitants are waiting for death, bored silly, whiling their time away with banal occupations – patience, short walks, crosswords – waiting for the next meal or the next infrequent visitor. This is more a retirement home than a hotel. Even great writers struggle to generate interest from a story of bored people with nothing to do, and while Taylor captures the sense of ennui well, it’s not enough to keep the reader engaged.
As a substitute for incident or plot, Taylor introduces Ludovic (Ludo) Myers a struggling writer. Ludo rescues Mrs Palfrey after a geriatric fall, and becomes, through a series of misunderstandings, her substitute grandson. Ludo has fallen straight out of the pages of ‘New Grub Street’ – he is trying to write a novel, keeps warm by working during the day in Harrods Banking Hall, (not the British Library, just for variety), subsists on tinned goods, and only puts his fire on a single bar when he is feeling extravagant. His friendship with Mrs Palfrey is the only thing that enlivens her days, but there is little of substance to it and it quickly fades.
Taylor is felt by some to be an undiscovered genius, a novelist spoken of in the same breath as Jane Austen. The comedy in the novel is ineffably slight – if you find old people being pompous and falling over funny then this is for you, but I found the novel’s ending, when Mrs Palfrey has another fall, and dies alone, unremembered, something of a release.
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100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, George Gissing, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, New Grub Street

New Grub Street, by George Gissing, 1891

Gissing isn’t really read very much today. His novels – or at least some of them – are still in print, but I doubt if he makes his way onto many syllabuses or reading lists. Certainly I would not be reading him now if ‘New Grub Street’ hadn’t appeared on the Guardian’s best 100 list. Does that really matter? There is a relentless Darwinism at work in determining what books are read and which are forgotten, and if Gissing is steadily dropping out of sight it is probably for a good reason.
‘New Grub Street’ tells at considerable length the story of a small group of lower middle class but educated people trying to make a living from professional writing. Some write novels, others articles for publication, reviews, and short stories. All are utterly obsessed with their financial situation.
“Poverty is the root of all social ills; its existence accounts even for ills that arise from wealth. The poor man is a man labouring in fetters. I declare there is no word in our language which sounds so hideous to me as “Poverty”” (page 33)
George Orwell, in an article about Gissing which ironically was probably written simply to keep the writer’s income flowing, claimed that we had “very few better novelists”, although he does go on to say that “His prose, indeed, is often disgusting”. Disgusting is a bit strong, but clumsy, undoubtedly. Take this sentence for example:

“Fixed in his antipathy to the young man, he would not allow himself to admit any but a base motive on Milvain’s side, if, indeed, Marian and Jasper were more to each other than slight acquaintances; and he persuaded himself that anxiety for the girl’s welfare was at least as strong a motive with him as mere prejudice against the ally of Fadge, and, it might be, the reviewer of ‘English prose’.”

But it’s not all stodge – some of the descriptive writing, of which there is admittedly little, is very well put, as in here when he describes one of his younger female characters:

“So exquisitely fresh in her twenty years that seemed to bid defiance to all the years to come”. (70)

There is a relentless focus in ‘New Grub Street’ on money – who has how much, what interest can be expected from savings, how much an article of novel might bring in, and so on, at extraordinary length. Rarely a chapter goes by when money, and its absence, is not the focus of the narrative. Even when ostensibly the story moves on to a discussion about relationships, these are determined solely in respect of the relative wealth of the participants. Creative endeavour can only be measured by the income it generates. Despite the grinding poverty that most of the characters suffer, the distinction between this group of people, who earn their living, such as it is, by writing, and the social group immediately below them who work for a living, is preserved at all cost. One character, Edwin Reardon, is actually left by his wife because he proposed to take a clerical post, rather than continuing to try to earn a living by writing novels.

 

New Grub Street is a depressing place to be. One writer dies of a consumptive-like illness which is not specified by is clearly derived from years of poverty; another commits suicide when the failure of his magnum opus becomes apparent, a third marries purely for money and social advancement, abandoning a young woman as soon as her inheritance falls through. It’s not just the world of writing that Gissing is condemning, but the society in general – Reardon, the one person who throws it all in and gets a proper job suffers just as badly as the rest.

 

A novel about writing is bound to break the narrative fourth wall from time to time. It is obvious at points that Gissing is writing from personal experience about trying to earn his living. The scenes where Reardon suffers horribly from writer’s block also have a poignancy suggesting Gissing had probably suffered similarly, as well as having felt the pain of having to write for payment by the page. But overall it is hard to feel too much sympathy for most of his cast of characters, and I feel no compulsion to seek out any of Gissing’s other novels for now. Just to end with one of my favourite quotes from an Amazon reviewer of ‘New Grub Street’. Missing the point with uncommon accuracy – “It’s not funny at all”

 

 

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 1984, 20th century Literature, Book review, dystopian fiction, George Orwell

1984 by George Orwell, 1949

When I re-read a novel (as here) for the umpteenth time, I always look carefully for things I have forgotten or overlooked the last time. It’s surprising what you miss – I wrote about this here a while back. The first thing that struck me about ‘1984’ is what a brilliant opening it has. Not just the extraordinary first line – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – but the opening chapter. Orwell packs so much into these few pages it positively fizzes – Big Brother, the anti-sex league, the two minute hate, the Ministry of Truth, doublethink and newspeak. It’s such a detailed and comprehensive evocative of the new world we are plunged into that it is shocking.

Orwell was the first writer who spoke to me personally through his works, and I absorbed all his novels, even those he wrote simply for financial reasons, and would have been happy to have seen pulped, as well as his journalism, letters, and anything else available. So making a dispassionate judgment about 1984 is impossible, and I am not even going to try. Orwell’s fierce intellect shines from every line – this has to be the most quotable novel ever written, particularly when you think that it was not written as a series of epigrams (unlike, say ‘Dorian Gray’) but as a dystopian horror story. The concepts that Orwell develops in this novel have become part of our popular and political culture – ‘Big Brother’ for example, as a short-hand phrase to describe the over-intrusion of the state into our private lives, (as well of course as a reality TV gameshow). 1984 is a passionate warning cry against the evils of totalitarianism.

But, and there is always a but, post-war ration starved Britain had already rejected the hopelessness of ‘1984’. In electing a Labour Government with a mandate for radical change, they had decided that they didn’t have to settle for the permanent rule of the party, and that things didn’t always have to be dreary and hard. The proles had rejected the lie of the ruling class that things can never get any better. Orwell seems to have completely missed that sense of optimism. Winston Smith believes that if there is hope, it is with the proles, the working class. But the proles of 1984 are so easily distracted by pulp fiction, machine produced porn, and a fake lottery that there is never any prospect of them organising and gaining a class consciousness which would allow them to “rise from slumber, in unquenchable number”. By 1949 the Attlee Government was clearly struggling – was that really the time to warn of the risks of a Soviet takeover of Western Europe?

I can’t find the faintest trace of hope in 1984. Some readers claim the post-script essay on the introduction and development of Newspeak suggests IngSoc did not last, but that seems clutching at straws. By the end of the main novel, Winston is broken, looking forward to the bullet in the back of his head as a mercy. There is no suggestion that the future holds anything but the stamping of a boot on a face, forever.

Eton-educated George, or should that be Eric, was always a stranger in the slightly smelly, uncomfortable world of the working class. His sense of alienation from the working class – even, one could argue, his submerged class hatred – is vivid in 1984. They are an utterly alien species, with goldfish like memories, no class consciousness, and representing nothing of value. Winston is amazed at their stoicism, as well as their ability to reproduce so prolifically – Orwell shares similar sentiments in, for example, ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. If the proles are the only hope, then there is no hope. I appreciate I am criticising ‘1984’ for not being a socialist manifesto, when of course it was never intended as such. But it handed a potent weapon to the critics of socialism, and all Orwell’s subsequent comments about the intention of his writing had little impact on the perception that he was a trenchant critic of English Socialism. Which is a pity, because there are few writers in the twentieth century who wrote as interestingly or as well as Orwell on social issues.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, H G Wells, HG Wells, humour, The History of Mr Polly

The History of Mr Polly by H G Wells, 1910

Most Victorian novels were about prosperous people. Yes, they sometimes had money worries, but they weren’t urban working class. Dickens changed all that, and people from all parts of the class spectrum became suitable subjects. However, the petit bourgeoise, the shop keeping class, technically bosses in that they were self employed, but dirt poor nonetheless, were largely ignored. That changed with the Grossmiths’ ‘Diary of a Nobody‘ in 1892, and ‘The History of Mr Polly‘ is an early entry in this ‘little man and his troubles’ or ‘white collar’ genre.

‘Mr Polly‘ opens with him sitting on a stile, grumbling. He hates his life. He doesn’t love or particularly even like his wife, he finds his job as a shopkeeper dull and unfulfilling, and he mourns the absence of any romance or culture in his life. He also suffers horribly from chronic indigestion, representative of his dissatisfaction with life. The first half of the novel is a flash-back from this point, chronicling how he has always felt this way, more or less, and how he reaches this nadir. He settles on suicide as the only logical escape and having made that decision implements his plan quite calmly. Inevitably he botches the job and in the process burns half his street down. Ironically this provides him, in the form of insurance money, an escape route and he runs away. The final section of the novel sees him settled as a handyman at a country pub, living a bucolic but largely culture-free lifestyle that seems to suit him. This life is threatened by uncle Jim, the nephew of the landlady, a thug who menaces her for money. Polly discovers the hero inside himself, stands up to Uncle Jim, and in comic bumbling fashion defeats him.

Polly is quite an engaging anti-hero. He reminded me of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby, one of my comic legends. He has a kind heart, and does his best to avoid causing harm. he takes the hardships in life as they come and looks for pleasure in small things. He has a way of mangling the language which is intended as humorous, and which just about manages to raise a smile. Despite his ineptitude in most things, somehow he manages to come out on top. Some of the set-piece scenes in the novel, such as his father’s funeral, where remote relatives descend on the wake and have a great day insulting one another, are enjoyable. If one looks hard for more serious themes, such as any traces of Wells’ Fabianism, they can be found, but the novel is not openly political. The main ‘message’ of Mr Polly’s history is that one should be true to oneself:

“when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary”

Mr Polly didn’t have such a terrible life. While slowly going bust in his shop, he didn’t suffer the privations many people experienced, and enjoyed many of the comforts of his Edwardian idyll – an idyll that was to be lost forever just a few years after this novel was published.

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