Category Archives: Book review

21st century literature, Ben Elton, Book review, Time and Time Again, time travel

Time and Time Again by Ben Elton, 2015

Time travelling. Could there be a more tired, worn-out plot line than time travelling? If 50 years of Dr Who hasn’t explored every single crevice and wrinkle of the multiverse, Ben Elton decided to give it a go. And for 95% of the book he very nearly gets away with it.

Hugh Stanton, ex-special forces, and recently widowed, is asked by his old Cambridge history professor for a Christmas drink. Here he is inducted into a secret society preserving the mystery of time travel, and in fairly quick order he is off to 1914, to save Franz Ferdinand, and kill the Kaiser. We all by now know enough about chaos theory to know that the chances of it all going smoothly are slim, and sure enough, despite mission being (sort of) accomplished, the law of unintended consequences kicks in and things start to go pear-shaped.

Elton has clearly done a lot of research into the origins and causes of the first world war, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Sarajevo and the events of the day of the assassination are recreated faithfully and realistically, as Stanton casually stalks Gabriel Princip.

In telling a time travel story the reader is invited to accept one huge implausibility. Having done so, with however much pseudo-scientific hoopla to provide a veneer of credibility, we then reasonably expect that the rest of the story will have an internal coherence, complying with the rules of common sense and order. So when Stanton is propositioned by a young woman on the train to Berlin, who proceeds to sleep with him at the first opportunity, something that in 1914 would have surely been pretty exceptional, alarm bells start to ring. This character, Bernadette, an Irish suffragette, is there to provide romantic interest and an opportunity for Elton to contrast 21st century social and sexual attitudes to those of 100 years earlier. It’s all a bit worthy and predictable.

Stanton is incidentally a rubbish time-traveller – he can’t avoid using 21st century slang, for example, and his lover stumbles across his laptop and guns.

The novel has some interesting things to say about history. When considering the question “if you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?” (Stanton actually changes two things, but that’s being picky) Stanton’s history professor proposes two alternative positions – either history is about individuals and the choices they make and the things they do, or it isn’t. if the latter is right, intervening in Sarajevo in 1914 will have little or no impact on the broad sweep of history. Elton proposes a third choice – that people can make a difference – Gabriel Princip clearly did for example – but chaos theory then kicks in, and the world can be dramatically different from just one simple action. Ray Bradbury did this so much better in ‘A Sound of Thunder’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder) to which this and all subsequent time travel stories owe a debt. If we can’t know whether our intervention will make things better or worse, then probably best to leave well alone, is the overall point being made. The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t just apply to time travellers – it could equally apply to those of us living today. It’s an argument for political inactivity. For what it is worth, while Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was clearly the trigger for world war one, my view is that the European powers had been shaping up for a fight for a long time – hence the arms race – and if the assassionation had been prevented another reason would have come along soon enough.

At the end, the novel implodes in on itself, collapsing under the weight of its absurdities. (Avoid this next bit if you don’t like spoilers). We are asked to believe that Stanton is only the most recent in a long line of travellers returning to correct the future, each making it that little bit – or in Stanton’s case a hell of a lot – worse. We are asked to accept that each Master of Trinity would open Newton’s “this is what you need to know to travel in time” letter from 300 years previous, successfully form a secret society of supporters to organise the trip, that each time traveller would succeed in their mission, realise that things had not gone as planned, write a letter to the future warning them, but that none of these letters would be found. As usual, unless you skate over the timey-wimey stuff pretty quickly, the ice cracks and you fall in.

Elton writes well, and his short chapters and frequent changes of focus keep the reader engaged, even when we have a pretty good idea where it is all going. The desire to frustrate that predictability leads Elton up some dead ends but does ask an entirely reasonable question – given that the 20th century ended with the end of totalitarianism across almost the entire world, civil liberties making progress in most countries in a way Edwardians would find hard to believe (actually, time travellers from the 1970’s sometimes find it hard to believe) and technology that is as close to witchcraft as make no difference – why would we change anything? He invites us to consider whether the world wars and the Holocaust were the price of all this progress? I don’t accept that for one second,  nor that we are now living in the ‘best of all possible worlds’ century, but it’s a question worth asking.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review, humour, Joy in the Morning, P G Wodehouse

Joy in the Morning by P G Wodehouse, 1946

I had a fairly strong reaction when I last read some Wodehouse, and I suspect my record of the event is intemperate. Having calmed down I returned to ‘Joy in the Morning’ determined to be fair minded. In that same spirit of fairness I ought to acknowledge that Wodehouse has some heavy-weight admirers whose opinion I have rarely had occasion to doubt. Douglas Adams no less is quoted on the cover of this Arrow (2008) edition saying “Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer ever”, and Stephen Fry is on the frontispiece describing Wodehouse as the “funniest and finest writer”. High praise indeed.

Written in the early 1940’s during Wodehouse’s internment in France and Germany during the second world war, this novel tells in Bertie Wooster’s first person narrative the story of his adventures at his uncle’s country home in Steeple Bumpleigh, or in Wooster’s words “the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my uncle Percy… is one of those imbroglios that Bertie Wooster believes his biographers will refer to as “The Steeple Bumpleigh Horror”.  The Guardian’s recent review described the novel as “both an elegy and an encore” – an elegy for a lost Edwardian Britain, and an encore because this is very familiar ground – Wodehouse recycled this very limited set of characters and situations endlessly. “

 

‘Joy in the Morning’ (and in my head I keep mixing this title up with ‘Morning Glory’ which is something entirely different) is a ‘greatest hits’ selection of comedic situations: the imposed engagement; a blazing country cottage; a nocturnal confrontation; a fancy-dress ball. The novel also contains an element of self-justification for Wodehouse’s involvement in what some considered war crimes, namely broadcasting on German radio from Berlin. “I doubt,” says Bertie, speaking of the writer Boko Fittleworth, “if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself.”

 

Despite my best intentions I did find myself laughing out loud at some passages. Wooster is such an idiot. But overall the novel is not a success. It is over-long and predictable. Wodehouse claimed to work tirelessly on his plots, and farce well done does require tight plotting in order to be plausible, but the plotting here is a mess. It depends on people behaving in ways that are more than just ridiculous but utterly unbelievable: schoolboys burning houses down, successful businessmen agreeing to conduct private meetings at a fancy dress ball, policemen leaving their uniforms on the riverbank while taking a dip in the river, and so on. The resulting comic situations lose a lot of their impact when they are set up so clumsily – we know Wooster is going to lose an important birthday gift brooch, that Jeeves is going to come up with a cunning plan to rescue the situation, that the imposed engagement will fade away by the end

 

Wodehouse may have been a collaborator, and may have romanticised a lost Britain that depended on a rigid class system that virtually enslaved the working class to preserve the privilege of a small minority, but he could turn a phrase, for example “There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”

 

Wodehouse is adept at using the gap between Wooster’s weaknesses, his village idiot view of the world and reality, to comic effect; many of them are having an affectionate nod towards Shakespeare:

 

 “It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”

 

“She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.”

 

“You can’t go by what a girl says, when she’s giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It’s like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn’t mean anything.”

 

The bromance between Wooster and Jeeves is as strong as ever, and even in this strangely sexless world, in which all a chap ever wants is to avoid being ensnared by an eligible young woman (what possible reason could Wooster have for not wanting to get married or be involved with any of the women who circle around him?) is quite touching. Jeeves and Wooster are only going to be apart for a few hours, but still say a tearful goodbye:

 

 “We part, then, for the nonce, do we?’

‘I fear so, sir.’

‘You take the high road, and self taking the low road, as it were?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I shall miss you, Jeeves.’

‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Who was that chap who was always beefing about gazelles?’
‘The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well, it was sure to die.’
‘It’s the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don’t mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?’
‘Not at all, sir.”

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

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

‘Lolita’ is not an easy book to review. Perhaps more than any other novel that I have reviewed on this blog thus far, ‘Lolita’ comes with a burden of critical responses that make it hard to see the novel for itself. It is an elusive text at the best of times, with its classically flawed narrator, constantly challenging the reader to ask whether Humbert’s words can be taken at face value, as they rarely can. ‘Lolita’ has lost none of its power to shock, even after the passage of more than fifty years since it was published, possibly gaining even more potency as our awareness of child sexual abuse has increased.

So I think I ought to start on safe ground, with a summary of the events and characters of the novel itself. The narrative is told as a recollection of events by the narrator, Humbert Humbert. An introductory chapter purporting to be by the book’s editor, but in fact forming part of the narrative, sets the scene – this is Humbert’s jail-cell confession, written shortly before his death. As with Nabokov’s earlier work, ‘Pale Fire’ there is a significant and palpable gap between the narrator’s view of events, and that of the reader’s, and it is navigating that gap that makes reading ‘Lolita’ both challenging and rewarding.
Humbert is a predatory paedophile, who after a period of grooming establishes a sexual relationship with his orphaned step-daughter, Dolores. It is significant that her name is not Lolita – this is a label given her by Humbert, as part of his attempt to erase her individuality and to control her. It is representative, if you will, of his abuse.
Nabokov set himself a huge challenge here – how to portray a monster through his own eyes, without utterly repulsing the reader. And make no mistake, Humbert is repellent. His abuse of Dolores is charted with euphemisms which do little to disguise the nature of the abuse. Some reviewers and critics (and to be clear, this is not an academic work, so I am not going to provide references to support this claim – assume when I write things like this I simply mean “stuff I have read on the Internet”) fall for Humbert’s version of events, and portray Dolores as the under-age predator, sexually precocious beyond her years, and responsible for seducing poor, vulnerable Humbert. The term ‘Lolita’ has over the years been used generically in this manner, which is a pity, because it should mean “victim”. Indeed, in most popular culture representations of Lolita she is portrayed in Humbert’s terms – sexually precocious, mature, even provocative. I even read one review online which suggested that ultimately the great achievement of this novel is that it makes the reader “fall in love” with Humbert, and that it is a love story. I recognise I am taking a very moral tone here, but part of the reason for keeping this blog in the first place was to chart my authentic reactions to what I read.
What might be interesting would be to give Lolita back her voice. Not as an imaginative exercise, but simply to look at what she says, as recorded by Humbert, but without his commentary. In the first part of the novel Lolita is only glimpsed, and is almost completely silent. When she is collected from camp by Humbert following her mother’s death, she has a few lines, but these are mainly every day observances. Of her thoughts on her abuse we have scarcely half a dozen lines, including (and to be clear, this is not an exhaustive list of her comments, but I think quite representative):

Before Humbert begins to rape her:

“Don’t drool on me. You dirty man” (130)

“Look, let’s cut out the kissing game”

“Lay off , will you”

And after the attacks begin:

“You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me? I ought to call the police and tell that you raped me. Oh you dirty, dirty old man.” (159)

“Can you remember, you know….the hotel where you raped me”.

“An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her” (159)

While you could expect Humbert to do everything possible to avoid this self implication, Nabokov has him implicate himself time and again. He is fully aware that he has no defence to his actions, and that Lolita is far from a willing accomplice, nor partially responsible for the crimes, as some commentators (see above) would have it. Apart from her age, and the significant age gap between them, he is a twice married man, and her step-parent, in loco parentis. He bribes her with clothes and treats, and finally pays her per sexual transaction. He threatens her with entry into the care system if she reports his attacks. He attempts to render her unconscious with sleeping pills in order to facilitate his attacks. None of this is consensual, even were consent to be possible.

“Eventually she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hiding place, which I never discovered, but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s theatrical programme. (209) With this clear illustration that even delusional Humbert realises his attacks are nauseating, can critics still describe this as a love affair? (I have found one reference to the magazine ‘vanity Fair’ describing ‘Lolita’ as “the only convincing love story of our century”.)

“She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident ‘what d’you think you are doing?’ was all I got for my pains. To wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would – invariably, with icy precision – plump for the former” (Nabokov, 166).

Some kind of normality settles on their existence as Humbert and Dolores restlessly criss-cross the country, always on the move to prevent her from making any friends or appealing to anyone for help. But Humbert lets slip that Dolores never comes to terms with the tragedy of her situation, her captivity:

“I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep”. (199)

Is this the behaviour of a young women enjoying the company of her older lover, (as Humbert would love it to be, but cannot persuade himself it is) or that of a deeply traumatised hostage?

‘Lolita’ is an extraordinary novel, written in a complex, allusive and elusive style which almost demands a re-reading. Its subject matter makes it hard to read at points, and I found myself immune to the charms of the monster that is Humbert Humbert. You have to admire Nabokov’s bravery in tackling what remains a taboo subject, and doing so by rejecting an easy stereotypes. In looking for a key to understanding this novel, a fruitless search I know, I keep coming back to the author’s post-script, where he describes the germ of the novel. A newspaper story told of an experiment where a chimpanzee was taught to draw, and eventually drew the bars of its cage. We can ignore the reality of the chimp’s life, but when given the ability to communicate it is the thing it draws. Lolita was caged, imprisoned by Humbert, and deprived of a voice, and we can catch glimpses of the horror of her situation all the more vividly because we see them through the soft-tinted lens of Humbert’s perspective.
 
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Book review, Bryson, travel writing

The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson – 2015

Many books are commissioned, but few as nakedly as this – Bryson openly admits that it was his editor’s idea to revisit the places he passed through for his earlier, and hugely successful, ‘Notes from a Small Island’ on the twentieth anniversary of the first book. Bryson has little interest in the idea, but has to make a living, and there are worse ways of doing so than this. In case we were in any doubt that this is a Notes Mark 2, the subtitle rubs the point in. As a result it is unavoidably obvious that Bryson is on auto-pilot for much of this book, going through the motions in a fairly loveless way.

Notes Mark 1 had a certain charm. It showed the newly arrived Bryson falling in love with 1970’s UK, rather remarkably given the many things he found profoundly wrong with the country, from its racist television programmes to its appalling customer service. A lot has changed since Notes Mark 1, and while Bryson clearly realises that revisiting the poorly remembered scenes of his first trip round the country is a mistake, he does it anyway. At least, he takes the trip after a fashion, although the visits to various locations are completely haphazard, fitted in around his busy schedule of readings and family commitments, giving the book a very fragmented flavour.

 

Some reviewers have been appalled at Bryson’s grumpiness at what he finds, and they have a point. But Notes Mark 1 found much to be grumpy about first time round, and the second time round the block he finds many things much improved. Inevitably much has also deteriorated, and many of Bryson’s complaints will be familiar – poor customer service, the loss of individual high street shops, green belt development, and so on. If this was all the book consisted of – a long whine about how things were so much better in the good old days – then I doubt I would have ever made it to the end, completist though I am. (Word doesn’t recognise that word, which is strange as it is in lots of online dictionaries. Go away red-underlining. Clicks ignore. That’s better). But happily there is more. Bryson has a wide range of anecdotes to tell about the places he visits, and some of these are entertaining and informative. I suspect his working method is something along the lines of telling a researcher he is going to Telford (or wherever) the following week, and asking them to come up with some interesting “QI” style facts about the town and its inhabitants, which he can then discover on location.

Now here is something slightly interesting – the American version of this book has a different subtitle, to whit “Adventures of an American in Britain”. This is wrong in several ways – Bryson isn’t an American, having taken British citizenship recently as explained in the book. He certainly doesn’t have any adventures – unless you call walking rainy streets looking for something to do, finding a discarded newspaper in the corner of a dingy backstreet pub, flicking through it, giving us one or two headlines, then retiring for a curry somewhere, adventurous. Bryson does little to disguise the fact that he often finds the whole exercise quite boring, and wishes it were over and he could go back to his family.
In between all the nonsense, Bryson occasionally has something interesting to say about the changes he sees in the country, best described here:

“It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself.”

Well said – only disappointing that he doesn’t follow this through to its inevitable conclusion about the way money is spent in this green and pleasant land.

There are also occasional glimpses of genuine wit, even if these stand out by their isolation, such as:

“According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo.”

I’ll keep reading Bill Bryson, because I always feel slightly virtuous when doing so, but I am not sure I am ever going to enjoy him in the way I did when we were both a bit younger.  
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Book review, children's literature, Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman –

Among the candidates for award for the best opening line to a children’s novel, this has got to be in with a shout:

“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. if it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to the house to do , and both the blade and the handle were wet.”

Pretty chilling stuff. ‘The Graveyard Book’ opens with the murder of the parents and sister of a young child, Bod (short for Nobody) who escapes the attacker and ends up in a graveyard. Here he is protected, and eventually brought up by, the ghosts and other phantasmical creatures that live there. I have read that this book draws inspiration from Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’. That makes sense – young child brought up by non-humans, gradually comes into contact with the outside world and learns its strange ways, all the while menaced by the killer who claimed the lives of his family, and finally getting his revenge. But to be honest the parallel was not all that obvious when reading this book. Gaiman may borrow the structure of ‘The Jungle Book’, but he makes the material entirely his own. In part that comes from the supernatural element, which he has a lot of fun with. All the ghosts are introduced by their gravestone inscriptions, (“She sleeps, aye, yet she sleeps with angels” or simply “son of the above”) and their lives and deaths all form part of their characters. But Gaiman also adopts a much darker tone for the novel – whether it be in the real menace provided by the murders of Bod’s family, the repeated further attempts on his life, or the sad fate of some of the graveyard’s inhabitants.

‘The Graveyard Book’ will appeal most to pre-teens with a taste for the macabre and supernatural, but there is plenty of interest for all readers, not least (in this Bloomsbury edition) the wonderful illustrations by Chris Riddell. Personally what I enjoyed most, and what I suspect was the original inspiration for the novel, was the extraordinary sense of place. The graveyard itself is really the central character of the book, and Gaiman recreates and imagines it in wonderful detail – I find it hard to imagine that it is not based on a real location. Some novels start with a location, a setting, which then become the backdrop for a series of adventures. In using this approach, in which the majority of the events of the novel are set within the confines of the graveyard itself, Gaiman ran the risk of the whole thing becoming quite claustrophobic, but overcomes this by breaking free from time to time, and by exploring the graveyard itself as if it is Bod’s whole world. Because he spends all his time with ghosts, Bod is utterly unafraid of death, and sees nothing to worry about in the fact someone is determined to murder him. The other principal achievement of the novel is in its creation of a set of villains – the Jacks of All Trades – a sinister, other worldly conspiracy – that are genuinely scary.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Animal stories, Book review, Jack London, The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild – Jack London – 1903

‘The Call of the Wild’ follows the adventures of Buck, a St Bernard/Collie cross. Buck is stolen from his Californian home, and sold to fuel the need for sled dogs in the Yukon as part of the 1880s gold rush. Buck goes from being a relatively pampered pet to being a possession, to be used and treated as a commodity, beaten close to death, worked even closer. London was a socialist and had first hand experience of the privations of the Yukon and the brutal treatment of animals, but I couldn’t avoid thinking that the story is more than just about dogs. 

Aren’t there clear parallels between the way Buck is broken and abused, and the treatment of slaves in America? I’m not suggesting the novel is a metaphor or parable – it could just be a story “about dogs” (I often check the Amazon reviews on books I am planning to write about, to get a feeling for the overall response, and see if there’s anything significant I have missed. One reviewer for ‘The Call of the Wild’ claims to have been disgusted upon finding out that the novel was “about dogs”, which I have to say I found wonderfully dumb) – but London’s political background suggests that his sympathy for the literal underdog extended beyond animals.

Buck is trafficked together with other captured and bought slaves, sorry dogs, to the Yukon, where he is savagely beaten until the fight goes out of him. He learns his new role chained to the straps of a sled. He is given bare rations, and slowly finds a place in the pecking order amongst the team. Once his job is done he is casually discarded, bought at a discount because he is no longer needed, and once again placed in chains. He finally finds an owner who treats him with love, but this relationship ends brutally, and Buck surrenders to the primal instincts he has been fighting for some time, and gives in to the ‘call of the wild’, becoming leader of a wolf pack.

This is not a story for animal lovers, or at least not those with any trace of sentimentality. Dogs die throughout the book, often killed by Buck himself, but also in a wide variety of other manners. Dogs are portrayed as fierce animals, following instincts derived from their days as man’s earliest companion, when the world was much darker and more dangerous. The novel of course anthropomorphises Buck, giving him human feelings and thoughts, and an understanding of the world far beyond what any pet would ever actually have, but he remains an animal, killing when he has to, and following his instincts – well, almost all his instincts – London understandably doesn’t goes down that road!

At just over 100 pages long this is a short adventure story that can be read in an afternoon or less. The Yukon is captured realistically through Buck’s eyes, and there is a wide cast of characters – I particularly enjoyed the stupid family who ignore the advice of experienced trappers and disappear through a hole in the ice, as we knew they would. The novel is carried forward at a frenetic pace, and the exercise of seeing the world through an animal’s eyes is well done. But at the end of the day this is just an adventure story, and I suspect London wrote books other than ‘Call’ more appropriate for adult readers. Whether I will seek them out is another matter.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, gothic fiction, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Nightmare Abbey, satire, Thomas Love Peacock

Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock – 1818

bey‘Nightmare Abbey’ is probably as heavy-handed a piece of satire as you will find in the whole of literature. Neither nightmarish – there are none of the traditional characteristic features of gothic fiction – nor set in an abbey, this short novel is partly a thinly disguised portrait of some of the romantic poets of the time, and partly a pastiche of their works.

It is tedious in the extreme. Some of this is deliberate – in parodying cloying philosophical nonsense it is hard to avoid writing philosophical nonsense. The trick is I suspect in providing just the right amount. There’s little or no characterisation here – all the characters are cyphers – Mr Lackwit, Mr Toobad, or the Reverend Mr Larynx. There’s also little or no narrative. The characters assemble in the abbey, which is really a moated country home on the remote Lincolnshire coast, where Scythrop Glowry, (admittedly, a pretty magnificent name) falls in and out of love as eligible females are paraded before him. Even Robert McCrum in choosing this novel for his list of 100 best novels in English for the Guardian in 2013 describes the plot as “cardboard-thin”. This is because the novel is simply a vehicle for Peacock’s friendly commentary on the lives and love affairs of the romantic poets. It may have had them rolling in the aisles in the early nineteenth century, but surely quickly lost its humour in a decade or two, and today provides many tumbleweed moments. Only one comment hit a chord; when, for the umpteenth time Mr Flosky, a friend of Mr Glowry senior is pontificating on his obscure theories, the narrator notes that he “suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense”.

The narrative voice is deeply cynical. Romantic relationships are purely commercial – “marriage is a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows upon his ticket the better” – and married life is a burden – “Mr Glowry used to say that his house was no better than a spacious kennel, for every one in it led the life of a dog”. Jane Austen wrote about relationships and courtships with a similar scepticism, but her characters are far more three dimensional and believable, and if you want a light-hearted commentary on the gothic novels of the period ‘Northanger Abbey’ is an infinitely better choice. That this novel squeezed out ‘Lord of the Rings’, the Gormenghast books, and others from the Guardian’s top 100 novels makes its inclusion all the harder to understand.

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Autobiography, Book review, Mark Seddon, Politics, Standing for Something

Standing for Something, Mark Seddon, 2011

This book is a curious combination of political biography and a rant against Blairism. As the former it is a mess; as the latter it is powerful and persuasive.

The political biography parts of the book, scattered throughout without any apparent structure whatsoever, whether chronological or otherwise, are written in a gossipy, laddish way, and consists almost entirely of anecdotes in which Seddon meets someone famous. These read like jotted down notes, and suffer greatly from lack of context – Seddon was largely an observer of events, rather than a participant. Even though he was a member of Labour’s NEC for eight years, he is the first to admit that during that period the NEC was neutered and largely irrelevant. His anecdotes are all quite slight, and have a half remembered vagueness that suggest he didn’t keep diaries.

But I don’t want to spend too long on what is wrong with this book, because when Seddon starts writing about the failures of the Blair/Brown coup of the Labour Party, and the political betrayals, some of which he clearly feels very personally, the book acquires an authenticity and passion. He has genuine insights into where Labour lost its way, and how it might recover its radical roots. For example:

“My hunch is that Labour will eventually be re-radicalised in opposition. It won’t take long before the howls of anger and pain from those at the sharp end – Labour’s natural constituency – will be heard as the coalition cuts bite ever deeper. And this time the newly insecure and visibly more impoverished middle classes, those who work for less pay and pay more in taxation in an intended decade long Tory attempt to claw back the deficit, will become more and more angry. Whereas a quarter of a century ago it was working class jobs that were going in their hundreds of thousands, by the end of the first decade in the twenty-first century middle-class jobs had become increasingly casualised.” (251)

“And as the first decade of the twenty-first century ended it was fast becoming apparent that the ordinary people of these islands were being forced to pay in their jobs and taxes for the greed of the bankers, the industrialisation and pauperisation of an economy” (257)

Obviously this was written in 2011 or 12, long before the end of the coalition and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, but I am fairly sure I know who Seddon will be cheering on now, albeit from the New York sidelines.

P.S. I did say I wanted to avoid spending too long on the negatives, but I don’t at the same time want to self-censor. The editing of this book was really poor. Here’s one example:

“‘Greeting Marra’ was his opening gambit before heading upstairs to plan our trip on an Eastern Counties double-decker bus to the sleepy Essex port of Wivenhoe, where coal was being landed. Our first outing as flying pickets, in an Eastern Counties double-decker bus, ended comically with us getting lost on the way…” (131/132)

Two sentences, both mentioning the same trip on the same bus, probably written a different times, and then stitched together without anyone noticing the repetition. This happens quite a bit. Also wearying was the staleness of some of the language:

“The expenses scandal crossed a new Rubicon“; “the icing on the cake was provided by the Murdoch media, which had managed to cast its baleful spell over the political class”; “Standing for Something finally opens the lid on the New Labour years, casting light into dark places“; all tired clichés from page 2 – on the following page “leading lights”, “warts and all”, “behind the scenes” (twice) and “rubber stamping” all jumped out, or rather limped out as I got increasingly frustrated with the important but poorly expressed thoughts Seddon or his editor were trying to convey. Of course look back through these blogs and you will find worse and more, but then I’m not a professional journalist, and don’t enjoy the benefits of an editor (except the occasional glance over the shoulder).

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21st century literature, Book review, David Nicholls, humour, The Understudy

The Understudy by David Nicholls

Sometimes novels don’t quite work. They really ought to, but at the end you are left with a vague feeling that the author missed an opportunity to write an entertaining, satisfying relationship novel, and instead wrote three quarters of one. This was Nicholls’ second book after ‘Starter for Ten’, which has a single white young man as its central character, through whom we see the events of the novel, as does ‘The Understudy’. While the protagonist in ‘Starter for Ten’ is relatively easy to identify with – he is fallible, but charming (although I am not sure female readers would agree) – the central character in ‘The Understudy’ is far less engaging. For a start Nicholls has given him a silly name – Stephen McQueen – and the joke “Stephen with a ph” wears thin pretty early on. Each time it was repeating I was reminded of the fact that as an aspiring actor he would have adopted a different professional name after about 30 seconds. He is dishonest, unsuccessful, profoundly so, divorced, and quite bitter about his lack of success. 

I am not sure if we were supposed to identify with McQueen, or find him in any way endearing, but I didn’t. He is manipulated and walked all over by Josh, the obnoxious character he understudies (if Josh is a portrait of anyone Nicholls knew in real life, they should sue!). Nobody really likes him, his life is a complete mess, his pursuit of acting success at the cost of his marriage is quite clearly pointless, rather than noble, and while the novel ends with him recognising that, failure isn’t entertaining or funny. He does – kind of – get the girl – but the attraction is really hard to understand or believe, and only the abrupt ending prevents us from seeing the inevitable rejection. I suspect Nicholls’ made Stephen so unlikeable in an attempt to avoid the standard rom-com clichés, but he didn’t follow this through – the character may be creepy and unloveable, but the situations he finds himself in are predictable and lame, all informed by a self-consciousness and determination to demonstrate that this isn’t ‘Love Actually’, actually.

The plot revolves around McQueen’s part as an understudy in a successful stage play about Lord Bryon, in which Josh has the lead. Each night McQueen has little to do except hope Josh is ill or has an accident, which he never does. Josh invites him to a party – and the comedy set up here is that Josh is actually asking him to help out as a waiter, while Stephen thinks it is an actual invitation. I saw that coming a mile off, but it doesn’t make sense – if you are having a party professionally catered, you don’t supplement the staff with vaguely worded invitations to casual acquaintances. That gives you a good flavour of the comedy incidents that are scattered through the novel, and which aren’t really that funny. Nicholls does his best, and there are plenty of drinking to excess, unsexy sex scenes, and theatrical failures – but its all a bit laboured and predictable. As an example, Stephen accidentally steals (whilst drunk) a BAFTA trophy from Josh’s flat. You know that the chances of him returning it with an apology, anonymously if necessary, are nil, this being a relationship comedy. So it’s just a question of when, not if, this theft is discovered, and sure enough, the award is found at the back of a wardrobe just in time for it to be used as an impromptu weapon.

‘One Day’ and ‘Starter for Ten’ have both been made into reasonably successful films, and my suspicion is that ‘The Understudy’ would actually make a better film than a novel. Some of the physical comedy would work better – for example the scene with Stephen dressed up as a squirrel for a children’s ‘How to count’ film, which he has lied about to his family, describing it as a crime drama – and some of the dead wood could be pruned. But if you are looking for a follow-up for ‘One Day’, ‘Starter for Ten’ would be a much better (forgive me) starter for ten.

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, Book review, Books made into films, Clockwork orange

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, 1961

clockwork‘A Clockwork Orange’ is narrated by the main character, Alex, a teenage boy in a near future but very recognisable society. Alex leads a gang of ultra-violent thugs, who every evening rape, murder, steal, and commit crimes with impunity. Alex really enjoys this aspect of his life, and the casual nature with which he describes his crimes is chilling. This effect is compounded by several other features of the novel – his age, his love of classical music (which poses the question how could one love music and yet be a monster) – but principally through the use of nadsat, an invented teenage slang. Burgess had noticed that teenagers adopt a specialist argot to confirm membership of their tightly knit group (which of course is the whole point of slang) and writes almost exclusively in this language. Alex can speak conventional English, and does so when the occasion requires (when he is pretending to be civilised, usually in furtherance of a crime) but his language of choice is nadsat. Just to give a flavour of this:

“There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days”.

Don’t let the apparent impenetrability of the language put you off – most words can be understood from their context – droogs here being gang-members for example – and even where the exact meaning is not immediately apparent, the overall meaning is usually very clear. The use of an alternative language reinforces the sense of alienation Alex and his droogs feel for the oppressive society they live in.

Burgess tackles several big themes in this novel. Violence and the degeneration of society – Burgess looks at the gang culture of post-war Britain, and anticipates it getting more prevalent and extreme. Free will is another central theme – once imprisoned, Alex is treated, brainwashed, so that any attempt at violence makes him feel immediately unwell, reducing him to a clockwork orange i.e. something apparently natural, but not so). In an aside, it is mentioned that the Government needs this treatment to be effective, to create more prison space for an anticipated influx of political prisoners. Language is also central to the novel, not only to express Alex’s alienation, but also that of his peer group – teenagers literally talk a different language from their parents; Burgess also notes that some ten year old girls that Alex picks up and brutalises speak a different argot – so each group is developing its own language. Burgess isn’t critical of this – he seems to accept it as inevitable, and while nadsat may not be the language of Shakespeare, it is creative and very expressive, both in its adoption of new terms (I particularly like the term “horrorshow” for “extremely”) and rhetorical phrases such as “Oh my brothers”.

Burgess undoubtedly wrote better books than ‘A Clockwork Orange’ – I have written here previously about my love for the Enderby novels for example – but none made a bigger impact, either at the time of publication, or more infamously with Kubrick’s film adaptation. The principal accusation is that the novel (and the film) glamorised and celebrated violence. There are certainly aspects of the novel that could justify that claim. The language used to describe violence reflects Alex’s enjoyment of the same:

“And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz-left two three, right two three-and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight”

The novel ends with Alex recognising that he is growing up, and there might be a future for him in settling down, getting a normal job, and raising a family. It is a strange, downbeat note on which to end, and apparently this final chapter was omitted from the American version, and the film adaptation. While the novel positively fizzes with ideas it is not, however, didactic – I doubt if anyone ever had their ideas or lives changed by it. I recognise that this may not have been Burgess’s intention – he once described the novel as “a sort of tract, even a sermon, on the importance of the power of choice” – but if it is, it is an unconvincing one. Would we really prefer pre-treatment Alex in his raping, murdering, ultra-violent glory to compliance, obedient post-treatment Alex? Yes, the loss of freedom of choice is painful, but so is the lawlessness and anarchy Alex creates when free. That of course is an entirely academic debate – the Ludovico treatment is fictional – so it is hard to get too exercised by the issue. Instead, the film generated a more pressing debate on whether portraying violence in a glamorous way can incite it. The relationship between film violence and criminality is not actually raised in the book – Alex not once attempts to justify his behaviour by reference to anything he has watched – in fact his cultural interests are completely high-brow.

Given a choice between more time in the bleak, post-war urban landscapes of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and the wit and erudition of Enderby, and I choose the lonesome poet every time.

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