Category Archives: Book review

21st century literature, Black Dogs, Book review, Depression, Ian McEwan

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

On a walking holiday (and honeymoon) in early post-war southern France, a young idealistic woman, June Tremaine, is terrified by an encounter with two menacing attack dogs. This incident leads in turn to a spiritual experience and changes her life. Surprisingly she decides on an apparent whim to live in France (very near to the scene of the attacK), in the process effectively separating from her new husband, Bernard.

This incident is the kernel around which McEwan winds this novel. Ostensibly a memoir written by June and Bernard’s son-in law, written shortly after June’s death, this novel has a complex narrative structure in which the telling of the tale is delayed time after time. The dogs themselves carry a heavy symbolic burden that they couldn’t quite bear – we know from the early pages that however scary they may be they do not carry out their attack (or at least that June survives to go on and have a family). And in fact it is not the encounter with the dogs which is the turning point in June’s life, but the spiritual epiphany which follows. While we can be gripped and menaced by the dogs, June’s quasi-religious response is not one the reader can easily follow or identify with.

If you have been scared out of your wits, and feel that your survival is a result of divine intervention, and that you need to rethink your life choices as a result – fine – but June’s response, essentially settling in a farmhouse in rural France and having a very nice, fundamentally selfish and not particularly spiritual life for the rest of your days, doesn’t seem to be a coherent response.

The scenes in Berlin as the Wall is coming down, something that obviously has an especial resonance for McEwan, contrast strikingly with the views of France. If a point is being made here – other than the mundane “war is brutalising and nasty” I couldn’t spot it. War has ravaged and damaged France, but the area the couple visit on their walking holiday seems largely untouched, even though the spectral presence of the black dogs is a reminder of the damage the war has done. But other than providing “colour” I didn’t understand why the scenes in Berlin in which the narrator hears a different version of the story of June and Bernard’s marriage needs to have the backdrop of the fall of the Wall.

McEwan can be forgiven some misses among the many hits. This isn’t his worst novel – I still struggle to accept just how silly “Amsterdam” was and is – but others are far more coherent and interesting. I don’t normally do this but one comment from an Amazon reviewer jumped off the screen as spot on – “there is also the idea that McEwan perhaps had a deeper vision he has failed to communicate.”

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21st century literature, Book review, Ian McEwan, Spy stories, The Innocent

The Innocent by Ian McEwan

McEwan is always strong when it comes to evoking a particular time and place, whether it be early 1960’s in “On Chesil Beach”, the Dunkirk evacuation (amongst others) in “Atonement”, or early 1970’s MI5 in “Sweet Tooth”, just to mention a few. The thing that jumps out from that short list for me is how precise this timing is – it is not a decade, or a generation which is invoked, but a very exact point in time and place. In “The Innocent” the setting is Berlin, 1955. Berlin is an occupied city, still literally shell-shocked, reconstruction is barely underway although the Wall has yet to go up – again giving us a very exact moment in time, a turning point in the way “On Chesil Beach” is timed between the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles first EP. The city is a microcosm of the Cold War and into this volatile environment Leonard Marnham, the eponymous innocent, a British telephone engineer, is dropped. Leonard is an everyman figure, innocent in many ways – sexually, politically, socially – and although he is quickly absorbed into an American plan to tap Russian telephone messages out of Berlin, he makes a terrible, indiscreet spy.

As a standard Cold War spy story in the Le Carre model, the introduction of a femme fatale, Maria, who approaches Leonard in a night club, comes on cue. Maria seduces Leonard by the book, and very soon he is under her spell. Leonard is too young to have fought in the war, but 30 year old, divorced Maria, survivor of the brutalities of the occupation of Berlin, is a wiser, more mature character who quickly becomes the senior figure in the relationship. Leonard develops a fairly sick fantasy in which he is an occupying soldier who forces himself on the helpless, vulnerable Maria. When he tries to act this out in a disturbing scene she is unsurprisingly repelled, and their relationship only survives by the intervention of Leonard’s American senior officer, Bob Glass.

The (protracted) climax of the novel comes with the return of Maria’s brutish ex-husband, Otto, a bit of a Teutonic caricature. Leonard and Maria are the only ones surprised by his return, and the denouncement is equally predictable, albeit the brutality of the episode is detailed and relentless. There then follows a scene when Leonard tries to dispose of the body (sorry, spoilers) and ends up leaving it in two suitcases in the tunnel dug to intercept the Russian telephone lines, on the Russian side of the border. When he then passes on the secret of the tunnel to the Russians, in a desperate attempt to avoid the body being found by the Americans, his fall from grace is complete, his last innocence lost.

The post-script “30 years later” chapter, when Leonard returns to Berlin just before the Wall comes down, is probably unnecessary, but does give Maria a voice, finally.

Although this is relatively early McEwan, a little derivative in its setting and characterisation, his potential as a mature novelist shines through. if you want to explore early McEwan start here rather than the award winning but badly flawed “Amsterdam”.

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Book review, psychology

Book review: You are Not So Smart by David Mcraney

Subtitled: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself.

This is a very gentle, easily digestible introduction to psychology. 48 chapters, each only a few pages long, covering all the basics of how the way we perceive the world is more complicated than we think. So far so good – this book began as a blog, and it shows, and who am I to pass judgment on bloggers taking their work further? Sometimes the dumbing goes too far – not all straightforward psychology points could be used to support the books central thesis, and they really didn’t need to – they should be interesting in their own right. I also felt the central thesis itself was part of the problem – explaining that the way we perceive the world is filtered through our senses, our memory and a host of other filters to create our perception of reality is a strong enough point on its own without it being reduced to the conclusion that we are not as smart as we think we are – it’s not about intelligence at all, it’s actually much more interesting than that. I accept of course that there is a marketing strategy at work here, and it seems to have been effective.

There were a couple of other quibbles I had with this book, which I generally enjoyed and consumed quite quickly. Firstly, it focuses relentlessly on everyday perception. Whenever it tiptoes closer to the darker side of psychology – not all brains are the same, and although we can be gulled into doing things we wouldn’t normally do, the point is we wouldn’t normally do them – it quickly moved on. Some people would do abnormal things, and these outliers on the scatter graph of human psychology are probably another but much more interesting book entirely. Secondly the book had a strangely mid-Atlantic feel which was a little disconcerting – apparently this was because it was originally American and had been edited for the UK market. Lastly the research the author draws upon was largely fresh – to me – but there were a few old favourites (the prison guards/prisoners experiment for example) which I was expecting to crop up throughout the book, and which eventually made an appearance. I was hoping he would manage to avoid the obvious, but he didn’t quite make it.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to read introduction to psychology you could do a lot worse. This doesn’t claim to be an academic textbook, and you largely get what you have paid for, with that caveat about intelligence/perception.
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21st century literature, Book review, Crime, Detective, Michael Connolly, The Drop

Book review: The Drop by Michael Connolly

The Drop sees the return of Harry Bosch, Michael Connolly’s grizzled Los Angeles police detective. Bosch is said to have seen action in Vietnam, and this novel appears to be set in the present day, so he presumably is getting on in years. Having retired and returned to work he now extends his service using a deferred retirement scheme – which gives us the title of the book. Yes, that’s right, a police story using an acronym for deferred retirement as its title. Of course there is an intended pun, in that the primary investigation in the novel is a suspected suicide by high rise jump. There is a sub-plot involving a DNA hit on a long unsolved murder which is integrated nicely into the overall structure – Connolly is a very experienced writer with 25 or so books to his name, and it shows.
This is a guilty pleasure – there is no pretence at anything other than entertainment, and I have to be honest I found it a very easy, undemanding, and enjoyable read. Bosch conforms to the stereotype defined by Raymond Chandler long ago, a loner who struggles with relationships and authority, determined to do what is right irrespective of the personal cost:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world….. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness….If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. ” (The Simple Art of Murder)
That captures Bosch, and many other fictional detectives, so well.
In any long running series there are some challenges for the writer – how to avoid repeating yourself and being predictable while at the same time working within the recognised structure – avoiding gimmicks like relocating to different locations, (although the last Bosch novel did end up in Hong Kong). As a police detective there are constraints on where and how Bosch can work, limiting the writer’s scope for innovation. And within these constraints you can only have so many angry confrontations with impatient supervisors, interrogations of over-confident suspects, intuitive breakthroughs from tiny clues, etc, etc. Connolly seems to have recognised these issues, but shrugged and thought people will keep buying the books so no real need to keep things fresh.
As a result this novel has a reheated feel, one of Connolly going through the motions. Bosch has a short term romance – but guess what, work gets in the way. City Hall politicians conspire to frustrate his investigation. A killer wonders who will play him in the film of his exploits. And a suspected suicide turns out to be, guess what, a suicide! There’s nothing here to surprise or challenge the reader, but it is clear that the reader, even this one, sometimes wants plain undemanding fare. Same again please.
Connolly suffers from the comparison with Chandler, as every crime writer would, but if you want a murder story that aspires to be something that will just pass away a train journey, it’s Chandler every time.
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20th century Literature, Book review

Starlight – Stella Gibbons

This is a curious novel. It follows two impoverished sisters, Gladys and Annie, living in a run down part of North London. Their landlord sells their home to a “rackman” – a phrase many people will be unfamiliar with, but used here to describe an unscrupulous landlord likely to drive up rents, harass tenants, and ignore the fabric of their properties. If you are interested in the original Rachman this makes an interesting read – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rachman.

While the new landlord does indeed appear to be closely modelled on the original, instead of turning the sisters out into the street he installs his ailing but apparently much loved wife in the neighbouring house. She has an au pair, a German refugee, Erika, and a daughter, Peggy. Peggy’s parallel unhappy love story has all the hall marks of a short story worked into the longer narrative (nothing wrong with that by the way – Raymond Chandler did much the same thing to stunning effect in some of his novels). The sisters, drawn with some affection but no illusions as to their frailities (Glad is a gossipy fool, Annie a nervous hypochondriac), turn to the local clergy for assistance. The vicar and his curate are another pair in this story of couples, again drawn with affection but unblinkingly, their flaws and weaknesses shown without hesitation. The eccentric lodger living in the attic appears in the narrative occasionally adding a further element of mystery to the story.

As a novel Starlight has its limitations. We slowly come to like the central characters, more or less, are happy for them when their lives improve, and take pleasure in their small victories and enjoyments. The wider cast is equally well drawn, but are closer to caricature. The novel has some awkward moments which to me indicated some clumsiness in drafting – people behaving in ways that do not feel natural or convincing, such as the landlord Pearson being knocked down by the 60 year old vicar, or the (spoiler) motiveless murder of the old man from the attic.

It is probably as a period piece that this novel holds the most interest, a portrait of a time when one generation of English people were still looking back to the war, and the later generation warming up to the 1960s. We aren’t told when the action of the novel occurs, and Gibbons uses this imprecision to show the different perspectives of her characters. One of the older characters refers in a slip of the tongue to drawing the curtains as “doing the blackout”; the older characters shop as if they were still subsisting on rations (in a way they are), and live in world where houses are still uninhabitable from damage from the Blitz. The younger ones go to a dance featuring the long-haired “Spacemen”, locating the novel’s events right up to the time of publication (1967), more than 20 years after the end of the war. Erika brings this gap being a refugee from a continent seemingly only just recovering from the war. The narrator, and the author, firmly sides with the older generation, having little sympathy for longer than collar length hair, drawing links between this debauchery and mindless street fighting and murder.
What makes the novel genuinely weird is the plot line about possession. Yes, demonic, head turning, green eyed possession, eventually cast out by crucifix wielding, holy water splashing clergymen. I’ve exaggerated for comic effect slightly here, but only a little. It is a decidedly odd element to introduce, and despite its centrality to the climax of the novel actually adds little to the overall impact of the story.
I bow to no-one in my admiration of the genius of Stella Gibbons, which peeps through here in many elements of this novel, but overall I can’t deny that this is really for the completists amongst us. Many thanks nonetheless to Vintage for republishing these long lost novels.

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20th century Literature, Book review, Patrick Suskind, Perfume

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

This blog was originally going to be about that small sub-set of books that I found offensive, but re-reading parts of this particular novel reminded me just how objectionable I found it, and how puzzled I was that I seemed to be the only person who has a problem with it.

Google any combination of the words “Perfume” “Suskind” and “misogyny” or “feminism” and you won’t find anything. And yet I am genuinely puzzled that feminists did not feel outraged by this novel. So what is my problem?

Let’s start with the Wikipedia entry for it, which says  
“Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 1985 literary historical cross-genre novel (originally published in German as Das Parfum) by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meaning that scents may carry. Above all it is a story of identity, communication and the morality of the human spirit.”

So a story of a murderer – the clue is in the title – isn’t about a lunatic murdering virgins and abusing their bodies to distill scent from them, but is about nice, fluffy things like identity, communication, and the human spirit. Is it really?

Imagine an advertisement for a film. It promises to feature the casual murder of 20 virgins – and the emphasis of their sexual status is Suskind’s, not mine – followed by an orgy and scenes of cannibalism. The bodies of the murder victims are abused by the murderer in some fetishistic way to distill “perfume”. What kind of film would you expect – an exploitative torture porn video nasty, or something literary and sophisticated.

I appreciate the case for the defence will be that I shouldn’t take this too literally – despite Suskind’s determined focus on making each scene as real as possible by his focus on the senses throughout the novel – and that this is magical realism, where the brutal slaughter of young women is a metaphor for…. – what exactly? This case is laid out, for example, in the dozens of laudatory reviews on Amazon, for example this one:

“I came to this book expecting to find a crime novel, or a thriller, about a serial killer. Instead I found a beautifully written and deeply researched novel about a young Frenchman with an unusual sense of smell and a unique gift for the art of the perfumier. In fact, the murders of young girls, so emphasised in the film, take second place to the marvellous descriptions of how perfume is made, and the way in which Grenouille gradually infiltrates the profession, becoming a master perfumier due to his prodigious gifts“

The murders of girls takes second place to the descriptions of how perfume is made? Really? I don’t give a stuff about the technical detail as to how perfume is made, but I am pretty sure it doesn’t involve murdering virgins. grenouille may have been a skilled perfumier, and I am sure Hitler could whip up a nice cheese omelette, but talk about missing the point.

To be as clear as possible, it is not the literary treatment of murder that I find objectionable – that would preclude me from appreciating large sections of world literature, including Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus, anyone?). Murder can be used to shock, to amuse, or to make any other number of points. It can even be handled in a way that is hard to stomach (for example, American Psycho). But the idea that women’s bodies contain within them an essence that can be found as long as you kill enough of them, and that this is some way legitimises their killing, I found nauseating.

I am aware I have not made the case for the prosecution compellingly here – it is hard to define the offensive, even when it is staring you in the face. Equally I accept no-one else seems to have a problem with this novel and its treatment of women. But I found it nasty, brutal, and disturbing. If that was Suskind’s intention, fine, but why is everyone else pretending this is a high minded dissertation on identity and the like?

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Book review, horror, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post

Supplementary: further thoughts on Frankenstein

In this post I would like to explore the possibility that the monster was the creation of Dr Frankenstein’s ego or unconscious, and that the crimes in the novel were committed by the good doctor himself. Furthermore I would like to suggest that the source of this psychosis is his fear of his own sexuality. This answers the question most often posed about this novel – who is the real monster, Frankenstein or his creation, with the answer “They are one and the same“. It also explains why the doctor and his creation are so often confused in popular culture, with the name Frankenstein being used for both of them.

To deal with the most obvious objection first – how could the monster be Victor’s alter ego when there are numerous references in the novel to other people seeing the monster? It is important to remember that almost all this evidence is in fact presented through the doctor’s conversations with the explorer, Walton, he meets at the beginning of the novel. We are invited to accept Victor as a reliable narrator, but objectively there is little reason to accept what he tells us without question. First and foremost his story is utterly fantastic – if you met someone raving about having created a monster you wouldn’t just say, “oh yes, that’s interesting”. You would naturally want to know more, and to challenge what you are told. The absence of that challenge, just the plan recitation of the tale, presented unquestioningly, lulls the reader into accepting Frankenstein’s story. As well as its fantastic nature, consider also the context – he is alone in an Arctic waste, chasing after a distantly glimpsed figure that may or may not have been himself. His story tells of a monster that kills his family and friends. Could not the monster be that part of his personality that he considers monstrous? Was, in fact, Dr Victor Frankenstein the first recorded case of manic schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, the forerunner of another famous self-creator of monsters, Dr Jekyll?

This reading explains a lot, for example the lack of detail over how the monster is created – if this was a delusion then the subconscious could easily skip over the process to focus on the outcome. The disgust Victor feels in the process of creation can be explained by his disgust with procreation, simply put, sex, and cannot believe what he has done. In his psychological crisis he creates the monster to separate the innocent part of himself from the monstrous.

The murders of family and friends is further circumstantial evidence, although Victor can’t be tied closely to any of the murders. There is enough evidence to at least cast suspicion, to the extent that he is even arrested for the killing of his best friend Clerval, and later held during his breakdown after the murder of his wife. The murder of his bride, on the first night of their honeymoon, represents the apotheosis of his sexual horror – rather than consummate his marriage he kills his wife and then faints. His conversations with the monster represent the inner monologue of the two parts of his personality. Virtually no-one else sees the monster in the whole of the novel, albeit admittedly with some exceptions. You would expect a beast lumbering across central Europe to be the cause of some comment – but the monster is never seen or spotted other than at a distance, and then only as reported by Frankenstein.

The exceptions to this are the family he haunts – but this could easily be Frankenstein himself, or just another delusion about his dreams of acceptance into a happy family. The other important exception is the occasion when explorer sees the monster just after doctor’s death at the very end of the novel. This is harder to explain away, but hardly conclusive – the explorer is not necessarily the reliable narrator we are led to believe.

The source of Victor’s psychosis emerges from a closer reading of the section of the novel dealing with the murder of his wife, Elizabeth. Chapter 22 opens with their engagement and wedding. Having been promised that he will return on his wedding night, VF is tortured by fear of the monster, and wants to shun the company of others – “I felt attracted to even the most repulsive among them, as to creatures of an angelic nature and celestial mechanism. But I felt I had no right to share their intercourse.” Who is most commonly characterised by VF as angelic? Elizabeth of course. And who feels unworthy to share “intercourse” with his fellow man? VF feels guilty and worthless because of his “unhallowed acts” – a suggestion that he is unable to face sex with his bride on their wedding night because of previous repulsive and criminal acts. This is the language used to describe homosexuality in the 19th century.

Unable to accept his sexuality VF at first avoids contact with Elizabeth, running away from her to the extent of travelling the world. Apart from her, the part of his personality that wants a conventional relationship comes to the fore, and he agrees to marry her. Before their wedding he writes to her telling her he has a “terrible secret” which will “chill your frame with horror”. VF knows that the monster will unavoidably be with him on his wedding night, because he and the monster are one and the same, and the monstrous, hidden aspect of his personality is his sexuality. There is no hint whatsoever in the way he speaks of Elizabeth of any sexual feelings, only tenderness.
Chapter 23 brings us closer to the wedding night, and the confrontation with the “monster”. VF sends Elizabeth to bed, knowing this is the scene of the coming confrontation. He resolves not to join her until “I had obtained some knowledge as to the situation of my enemy” – here the enemy being his recalcitrant sexuality.

Elizabeth is strangled and VF falls senseless to the ground. When the hotel owner and others come into the room a little later, there is no sign of the monster. There is some confused business here in which he appears to awake from his faint in another room, surrounded by the people of the inn, because he then goes back alone to the bedroom where Elizabeth’s body lies, where he then spots the monster goading him. Again no-one else sees the monster, and after a fruitless search “most of my companions believing it (the monster) to have been a form conjured up by my fancy”. If they genuinely believed this then they can have drawn only one conclusion about the cause of Elizabeth’s death, the identity of her murderer. His guilty behaviour continues as he flees the village without telling anyone, and returns to Geneva. He descends into madness and is kept locked in a cell and his again suspected of being the criminal.

In moments of lucidity VF recognises he is responsible for the killings. He tells his father “I murdered her. William, Justine and Henry – they all died by my hands“. Indeed.

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20th century Literature, Book review, Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, 1962

“Pale Fire” is a complex, multi-layered post modernist novel – but for goodness sake don’t let that put you off! At the heart of this novel is an extraordinary romp – and that’s not a word you expect to see used to describe a modern novel.

The structure of the novel is worth spending a minute or two outlining. It opens with a 999 line poem, which is followed by what appears to be at first a detailed critical analysis of the poem. The critic uses appropriate technical language and phrases and the reader is not alerted to there being anything out of the ordinary in this set up. This appearance slowly begins to unravel. The first hint that all is not as it seems occurs when the critic is disturbed by some noise outside, and this intrusion appears in his notes. The situation quickly spirals from here, as we come to understand that the writer – Charles Kinbote, academic and friend of the now deceased poet John Shade, is in fact delusional. He is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and nothing he tells us can be taken at face value. Sometimes slips in his facade reveal a different perspective, but any “revealed truth” has to be treated with equal care. This is not a world in which the true state of affairs is within our grasp; we are just shown different levels of illusion.

Kinbote’s footnotes to the poem steadily lead the reader to understand that he took a teaching job in the United States and cultivated an acquaintance with Shade, imposing his company despite the resistance of Shade’s wife. Over time, he tells Shade the fantastic story of King Charles the Beloved of Zembla and his escape into exile. We are invited (by Kinbote) to infer that he is telling his own story, and that he wants Shade to turn this narrative into his poem; a suggestion Shade stubbornly resists.

The real delight of the novel is this Zemblan fantasy. It is outrageously kitsch, almost unquotable in that every sentence is at once ridiculous, over-written, camp, and hilarious. The king’s escape from imprisonment, his disguises and near misses, is all related breathlessly, kept superbly in tone. A parallel narrative relating the journey of Shade’s accidental assassin across Europe to the US is of a piece of this comic operetta style, closer to some of the tone of cheap gangster or spy stories.

In constructing this inner narrative we are invited to see the world outside it as real – similar to the way McEwan uses the alternative ending of “Atonement” to bring into focus the “real” ending. In this “real” world Kinbote is a disturbed academic, Gradus the assassin an escaped lunatic or criminal trying to kill the judge from whom Kinbote rents his house, and Shade is who we are told he is, the one constant through all the layered narratives. But there are many warning signs that tell us that however flawed and ridiculous Kinbote’s stories may be, the world from which he relates them is equally artificial. There is no safe ground to which the reader can anchor themselves, no fixed point of reliable perspective. The “real” world is equally flawed and ridiculous, albeit in a different, less comic, way.

On one level, the simplest reading of this novel is a satire on academia, and in particular the hangers on that surround famous writers, noting down their every comment for future inclusion in memoirs, chronicling the mundane details of the famous one’s life, and attempting to gain their place in the margins of the picture frame of posterity. No doubt this was in part Nabokov’s point, reflecting on some of the response to the publication of “Lolita”, but on its own this is a fairly mundane reading. But this is a fairly limited reading.

An alternative approach is to see the novel as a mystery story, in which we are invited to unpick the accidental revelation of the real events of the novel from Kinbote’s confused perspective. This is a seductive reading, as the reader is always led carefully into “guessing” what really happened a few pages before Kinbote confirms it. A good example of this is his identity – we work out that he believes he is Charles the Beloved well before the mask slips and he refers to Charles as “I” rather than “He”. But this guessing game is, once the reader realises that Kinbote is telling his own story, far too easy. Guessing games are sometimes fun, but they aren’t great literature.

Which leaves the complex, multi-layered narrative which is open to multiple, all equally valid readings. Which in turn makes this a classic modernist novel.

There are no rules about how or when to enjoy a novel, and the escapist fantasy of the King of Zembla, which wouldn’t feel out of place in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, is still for me the funniest, most enjoyable part of this novel.

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Book review, History, Keith Lowe, Savage Continent

Savage Continent by Keith Lowe

This survey of post war Europe is a natural sequel in terms of my reading to Ian Kershaw’s “The End”, reviewed here last month. “The End” described and explained the utter destruction of much of central Europe at the end of the Second World War – this books follows on by describing some of the consequences of that destruction.

I knew very little about this period before reading this book. If pushed I would have mentioned the Marshall Plan, and guessed that the process of moving from the anarchy and chaos of war to civilised society would take time and a lot of pain. Britain, which had never been invaded or occupied (the Channel islands excepted), and which had ended on the winning side, struggled to recover, and was not clear of the shadow of war until the 1950’s (arguably a whole generation was damaged by the conflict) – how much worse must it have been for those countries utterly wrecked by occupation, saturation bombing, and the deliberate destruction of industry by retreating forces? Add in the bitterness of ethnic tension and a thirst for revenge against collabarators and others, and it is hardly surprising that “Europe in the aftermath of World War 2” was the “savage continent” Lowe describes.

The human instinct for neatness means we readily accept the story that the war ended in 1945, but for many of the people of Europe their problems had only just begun. For many others the war raged on without respite. Lowe chronicles these stories clearly and navigates the complex moral issues adrioitly. His analysis is bravely unblinking – he does not turn away from analysing atrocities irrespective of who commits them. Suffering is not ignored, even if he does not fall into the trap of drawing moral equivalences between the crimes of an invading regime, and the revenge attacks of the newly liberated. He engages with some of the most difficult and passionate controversies of the 20th Century – for example, do the crime committed against the German people of Eastern Europe by the Soviets and others in any mitigate the impact of the Holocaust – and presents the arguments and evidence and makes judgments the reader is compelled to trust.  

The importance of knowing how the Europe of today emerged from the ashes of World War 2 is key to understanding so much about European history – the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (the one country that didn’t undergo massive ethnic cleansing in the post war period); the Cold War; the formation of the Warsaw Pact, and the modern European Community amongst many others. I simply didn’t know before I read this book about the subversion of democracy in (ironically) post-War Greece, aided by the British, nor how the Communists took control in many Eastern European countries in a manner reminiscent of the Nazi take over in Germany – get a foot in the democratic door, then gradually use what levers of power you do control to get more, until the opposition is finished. That is what makes this such an important book. Knowing World War 2 didn’t have a neat tidy ending is one thing; understanding how the continent was torn apart before it could be slowly reassembled is quite another. This isn’t an easy read, both in terms of content and length, but it is well worth the investment.

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20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald – 1925

What is this? – not “this” the Great Gatsby, but this, the words I am writing? It is not a review – despite the heading of this blog you can’t really review a book published 90 years ago, not one which has attracted the wealth and weight of critical comment that much loved novels such as this have? At the same time a plot summary would be redundant, and random impressions need some kind of structure to make them worth reading. I think the best I am going to get to is “some interesting things I noticed about the novel that may not have been written about elsewhere, but probably have”.


I mention above that this novel is much loved – adored would be closer. On a first reading it is hard to see why – the central character is a deeply flawed former criminal, and is involved in the death of a young woman. But he sacrifices himself for the woman he loves without flinching, knowing that his life without her love is worthless. It is in that sacrifice that he finds redemption from his previous life of crime.

The Jazz Age setting is obviously seductive, conspicuous consumption meeting post Great-War hedonism and the early days of prohibition in a perfect storm of parties, frivolousness, and excess. The narrator, Nick Carraway is a tabla rasa who observes the events of the novel without meaningful judgment or any significant involvement – he seems as hollow as many of those he observes. He suggests that he has scorn for the nouveau riche and borderline criminal people orbiting around Gatsby, but is happy to join them, and condones Tom’s unfaithfulness to Daisy by his silence.

The novel is rich, almost burdened, with symbolism. The glasses that loom over the petrol station, a key scene for the very visual settings Fitzgerald uses, are explicitly compared to Nick’s neutral gaze. I am aware as well that the name Carraway suggests the very small (if pungent) seed of the same name – he is as unsubstantial and of little significance. As a narrator he is reasonably reliable, and does not hide or obscure events, but equally his personal role is not really important – he is only there to observe.

Probably the most mundane, but unavoidable, reading of this novel is that it represents a judgment on the Jazz Age and all its excess. Mundane because once you have drawn the conclusion that rich people aren’t that nice one doesn’t really have anywhere to go with it. Gatsby is usually exempted from this judgment, despite his background and criminal career making him in many ways its exemplar. His time in the war has taught him the cheapness of human life, although perhaps he did not value his own anyway, having lost Daisy to Tom, which is why his sacrifice, when it comes, seems so easily done.

I wanted to mention one irritation, which seems churlish given the overall strength of the novel, but stood out for me anyway. Prior to the motor accident that precipitates Gatsby’s demise there is a lot of “business” about who takes what car. This is a plot device to ensure Gatsby is mistakenly blamed for the accident. It appeared clumsily done to me – it was obvious there was some reason for the “take my car” ” no take mine” nonsense that didn’t really make much sense at the time. I may be being unfair to Fitzgerald, who I am sure wouldn’t mind that much anyway! Doubly unfair because the plotting may have been tight and I might have just missed the point, or simply because in the overall context of the novel a writer should be allowed to get away with little bits of business to engineer the end he is looking for.

I think this novel, given its place in the pantheon of world literature, probably deserves another reading, which given its relative brevity isn’t asking that much. For now its success is for me, elusive.

 

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