Book review

Any novel set in modern South Africa is going to be about apartheid. There’s obviously no way of avoiding the subject, but the author needs to find a way of addressing it that is original, to find a new way of telling the same story. The Promise is an interesting addition to the collection of novels that try to talk about the experience of the end of apartheid. It might say more about my reading choices than anything else, but most of these stories tend to be told from the white/Afrikaans perspective.

The Promise is told predominantly from the perspective of the Swart family, landowners and farmers just outside Pretoria. I say predominantly but one of the distinguishing features of this novel is the extraordinarily fluid narrative voice. It moves from character to character and scene to scene remarkably quickly, and there is often a beat where the reader re-orientates themselves to the new point of view. While it is usually made clear quickly who’s eyes we are now seeing the world from, that moment of uncertainty is disorientating. As a technique this is really effective in keeping the reader focussed on the word on the page – this is not a novel you can coast through, not without getting thoroughly confused anyway! It is broken into four sections, each set around ten years apart and focussed on the death of a family member.

Amor is the youngest daughter of the Swart family, and the closest the novel comes to a central figure. She is the still centre of the novel around which the other characters revolve. She witnesses her mother, on her death-bed, ask her father to promise to give the family servant, Salome, ownership of the run-down house she occupies on the family farm. The promise is given but insignificant to him and he quickly forgets it. When reminded by Amor he can barely recall having done so (although he never denies it) but it is clear he has no intention of doing keeping his promise. The worth of his promises is underlined when he assures Amor she will not have to return to the hostel she has been living in during her mother’s sickness, another promise that is quickly broken.

As successive family members die, Amor returns to the family farm to remind the surviving members of her father’s promise. Each time the issue is raised it is waved away as a nuisance. It’s hard not to translate this situation to the wider political context, with the farm representing the country and the promise being a political commitment to restore ownership of the land to the black community. During the course of the novel the apartheid regime comes to an end, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee completes its work, and Nelson Mandela is freed and becomes President. But the white community as represented in the novel retains its privileges and its prejudices, and the changes going on in the outside world seem to leave the Swart’s unaffected.

Of course the word ‘promise’ can also mean potential, and this novel is also about the wasted potential of the younger generation of the family. As a young woman, Amor promises to be beautiful, but that promise is (it is suggested) wasted, as she rejects her family, breaks contact with them other than to attend periodic funerals, and refuses to accept any income from the farm under the terms of a family will. This money collects in a trust account and she intends it to eventually go to Salome.

Anton, Amor’s older brother, undergoes a steady mental breakdown through the course of the novel. This breakdown is precipitated when, during his army service, he shoots and kills a woman protestor on the same day his mother dies. He believes he is in some way responsible for his mother’s death. It is that which troubles him, not the death of the black woman herself. He slowly descends into alcoholism, and while doing so tries to write a novel, which eventually Amor comes to read. She describes it like this:

“There are interjections from the author in the margins too. Is this a family saga or a farm novel? one says. And another. Weather is indifferent to history! And also, Is this comedy or tragedy? ..The phases of the man’s life, separated by intervals of roughly ten years, will map out his development into full maturity, from promise through defeat to return and ripening, in tandem with the seasons.” (277/278)

It is quite common for authors to anticipate and address critics comments within the novel itself, but I am not sure if I can remember someone doing it quite so openly. The Promise is both a family saga and a farm novel (another genre that is new to me!), and while the rest of this description parallels without quite matching the novel in which it appears, it seemed to me a very unsubtle way of reminding the reader that this is just a novel not a record of a real family’s lives. This breaking of the fourth wall happens at several points throughout the novel. At one point the narrator’s restless focus switches to a homeless man, almost as if by accident. After he is arrested for vagrancy, fined and discharged, the narrator observes:

He has a long walk ahead of him, back to the church that he regards as home, but there’s no reason to accompany him and, come to think of it, there never was. Why is he obscuring our view, this unwashed, raggedy man, demanding sympathy, using a name that doesn’t belong to him, how did he waste our time with his stories? He’s very insistent on being noticed, how self-centred of him, what an egotist he is. Pay him no further mind. (203/204)

The Promise reminded me of the 2007 Booker winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering. Both are constructed around families returning to the family home for a funeral, both of course won the Booker, and both front covers feature photographs of young girls staring directly down the camera. The Promise is the stronger, more interesting of the two, and I can see why it won last year’s Booker (from what seems quite a weak shortlist). Eventually it fizzles out, stopping rather than ending, and I was left wishing for a novel about apartheid that for once isn’t written from the white people’s perspective. Galgut could have given the black characters in this novel more than just a handful of lines, and portrayed them as more than victims or walk-on characters. Perhaps it’s not his place to write about the black South African experience of apartheid, (it’s not like he portrays apartheid as a good thing! or his racist characters in a positive way) just that the attempts at redemption by Amor (she goes to work as a nurse in ward for Aids victims) seem pathetic by comparison with the scale of the crime that was apartheid.

The Promise by Damon Galgut 2021

Aside
Book review

Before you start to read any novel you have a set of expectations (sorry) about what it is going to be like, both in terms of the broad plot outline and some of the likely features. These ideas are informed by other novels and works you may have read by the author, the novel’s representation in popular culture, and smaller details such as the cover illustrations and comments on the blurb. You may also have read reviews and commentary on the text. All this adds up to a picture before you even start reading, and for classic novels such as Great Expectations that picture is fairly detailed. My perception of Great Expectations was something like this: I knew that the novel started with the central character, Pip, meeting an escaped convict in an isolated churchyard (the name Abel Magwitch is pretty unforgettable). I knew that the novel features a Miss Havisham who lives among the ruins of her wedding feast. I also knew that at some point Pip moves up in the world and becomes a young gentleman, presuming this to be related to his great expectations. Beyond that things were a bit hazier. I assumed, given that this was Dickens, that there would be long-lost relatives reunited with siblings or children at some point, evil villains plotting the downfall of the innocent hero or heroine, and that fortunes would be inherited and marriages arranged at the end of the novel to end with a happily-ever-after finale. Finally, I also assumed Pip would probably be the novel’s hero, and would exemplify all the positive virtues we expect of such a hero – kindness, loyalty, honesty etc. In short, I suspected the novel would be a reworking of David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.

Of course I was quite wrong. Pip is a flawed character who ends the novel with a redemption, of sorts, but spends much of it being disloyal and unkind to his relatives. At one point he receives a letter telling him he is going to receive a visit from his brother-in-law, the ever amiable blacksmith Joe Gargery. Pip is brutally honest about his reaction to this news:

“Let me confess exactly with what feelings I looked forward to Joe’s coming. Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no; with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.”

This is not the reaction of a hero – but it is intensely human of Pip to admit to these feelings. Unlike the conventional plot of a traditional Victorian novel the hero here doesn’t inherit a fortune, he loses one (arguably two). The romance at the heart of the novel is painful and unrequited, as far from a traditional love story as it is possible to be. In other words this is a novel that confounds the readers expectations – the title becomes not a promise but almost a taunt. Pip’s expectations as to how his life is to develop may be great, but they are not realised. His life is not conventionally tragic but he is not really the hero of his own story, and his realisation that his life is not going to take the trajectory he anticipated is far from what the reader will have come to expect from Dickens. I once argued that Dickens an extremely consistent if not predictable novelist, and that it was hard to see much progression in his work. Great Expectations confounds that theory – it is clearly the work of a mature novelist who knows that some novels need more than a happy-ever-after ending in which all the loose ends are tidied away.

Pip’s redemption is the core concept of the novel, but it is also very much an adventure story. Dickens brilliantly captures the reader’s attention in the opening pages by diving straight into the novel’s key scene. Magwitch has Pip by the throat almost before Pip has had time to introduce himself:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip….

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it, sir.”

Notice how Magwitch appears to Pip almost as if risen from the dead. The sense of place evoked in these lines is extraordinary.

The novel is constructed in three parts, all three books being narrated by Pip from some distant point in his future. In book one Pip is a seven year old orphan living with his older sister and her blacksmith husband Joe Gargery on the coastal marshland of Kent. On Christmas Eve Pip meets Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict in the scene shown above. Magwitch scares Pip into stealing a file (to remove his chains) and some food and drink. Magwitch is swiftly recaptured, along with another convict with whom he has been fighting. This is an almost dream-like memory for Pip who has no idea of the significance it is going to have for his later life.

The other key childhood memory for Pip occurs when Miss Havisham, she of jilted at the altar fame, asks neighbour Mr Pumblechook to find a boy to visit her. (Out of context this seems a strange request – she takes little pleasure from Pip’s visits and instructs him simply to ‘play’. Pip sees nothing particularly unusual because he is a child and has yet to develop a sense of what is and isn’t strange. He is unphased by the fact that she still wears her old wedding dress and is surrounded by the detritus of her wedding day. Pip is smitten by Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter. Estella has been brought up by Miss Havisham to be hostile to all men, as a perverse form of revenge on the male sex. The regular visits to Satis House eventually end when Pip becomes as an apprentice blacksmith in Joe’s smithy. The final turning point of this stage of Pip’s life, and this book of the novel, comes when Mr Jaggers, a lawyer, tells Pip that he has been given a large sum of money from an anonymous benefactor, allowing him to leave the forge and become a gentleman.

The second book of the novel follows Pip’s experiences in London. He lives with Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor, a cousin of Miss Havisham. Pip is convinced Miss Havisham is the source of his good fortune. He learns more about her story which cements that conviction. He sees little of Estella and even less of his sister and her husband. Despite his generous allowance he builds up some serious debts. For me this section of the novel lagged. Pip seems to waste most of his time trying to become a gentleman, although the precise nature of his tuition with Mr Pocket is never described (nor barely mentioned). Fortunately this period of his life comes to an end when he finally learns that his benefactor is not Miss Havisham but Abel Magwitch, who has made his fortune (we are never told how) in Australia. Pip is traumatised by this news – he feels any money he receives from Magwitch is compromised and must be returned. As Orwell rightly points out in his classic essay on Dickens, ‘Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust…not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. But Pip’s sense of revulsion towards Magwitch slowly changes as he comes to realise that the convict may be a criminal but his instincts and intentions are far from evil.

The final book of the novel draws these threads together as everyone is given an ending suitable to their character. There are some dramatic incidents in which fate intervenes to ensure justice is served, and some long-lost secrets are revealed. I am as you can see trying to avoid too many spoilers. Pip matures significantly once he learns that his chance meeting with Magwitch in the churchyard all those years ago was the source of his great expectations. This seems to lead him to be determined to do the right thing regardless of the personal cost. He eventually comes to see Magwitch in a loving, dedicated way (feelings surely more due to Joe) and he dedicates himself to caring for the convict at the end.

While this is not a typical Dickens novel neither is it short on the things we expect and love from his work. The central characters are convincingly realised, even when they are eccentric or downright unpleasant. The plot is more compact and less byzantine than usual, and the cast of minor characters with strange names and idiosyncratic personalities – while still very much present – is shorter than in many of his earlier novels. The humour is often subdued – there aren’t many laugh out loud moments, although I did enjoy this description of a Saturday night at the Three Jolly Bargemen:

There was a group assembled round the fire … attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud…. A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this cosy state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.

Great Expectations is commonly considered one of Dickens’s greatest works. It was ranked above Bleak House, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities in the BBC Big Read survey back in 2003. I am not sure it merits that status – it goes without saying it is a great novel, but for me it didn’t have the depth of some of the others mentioned here. The fact that he changed the novel’s ending to allow readers the hope of a reconciliation between Pip and Estella suggests Dickens may have had his doubts as well.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, 1860-61

Aside
Book review

Peter Carey’s 1988 Booker-prize winning Oscar and Lucinda tells the parallel stories of its eponymous characters: Oscar Hopkins, a disgraced clergyman, and Lucinda Leplastrier, owner of a glass factory. The novel is narrated by one of the Oscar’s descendants several generations later, who is always keen to point out the role random chance seems to have in determining their fate. Although they eventually meet on board a ship headed to Australia, for a large part of the novel their stories are separate.

Oscar is raised in remote Cornwall by his father who is a preacher in the Plymouth Brethren, a harshly non-conformist group which believes in the literal truth of the bible.

He (Oscar) comes to believe that God wants him to convert to Anglicanism, despite his father’s conviction that this means he is going to hell. But his conversion is also, incidentally, a means for him escape from rural Cornwall and achieve an education. At Oxford while training to become a priest Oscar discovers gambling, a sin he is never subsequently able to escape from. Whilst at university Oscar is a social outcast. His poverty marks him out, as does his other-worldly appearance and his complete lack of social skills. By chance he meets a fellow student, Wardley-Fish (a larger than life character I wish we had seen more of) who introduces him to the joys of gambling. At first his horse-racing winnings provide him with the funds to stay at Oxford, but his gambling – even on the Sabbath – eventually gets him into trouble, to the extent that the church authorities decide to exile him to Australia.

Lucinda’s story is also dominated by her fascination (or perhaps it is an addiction?) with gambling. She is orphaned when she is a young woman. She inherits the large farm in Australia her parents bought following a move from the UK. Not really knowing what to do with either her inheritance nor the rest of her life she spontaneously decides to buy a glassworks. Making a success of the business isn’t easy – the fiercely misogynistic glassblowers don’t even allow her to enter her own factory. At a loose end, Lucinda falls into the wrong crowd, and begins gambling on cards. A trip to London isn’t the way of rebooting her life she is looking for, but on the way back she meets Oscar.

Oscar’s terror of the sea – and large bodies of water more generally – means he is unable to socialise or move freely around the liner taking them to Australia. Nevertheless they bond over their mutual hobby, and Lucinda eventually invites Oscar to stay with her in Sydney. Their friendship develops and society is scandalised when they live together seemingly as man and wife, although in fact entirely innocently. Their relationship falters as Oscar is convinced Lucinda is in love with Reverend Hassett, a glass expert she consulted on the acquisition of her factory.

The finale of the novel involves a dangerous and improbable bet – Lucinda challenges Oscar to deliver a glass church to Reverend Hassett in his new living in Boat Harbour. Yes, a glass church. If that were not improbable enough, instead of taking the church by sea, Oscar’s fear of water means he has to travel overland, through largely uncharted territory. This fanciful expedition inevitably extracts a high price from them all.

Oscar and Lucinda could have been the great Australian novel. Carey is recorded as having said of his writing “My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country“. The colonisation of the continent by the British and others, and the impact this had on the indigenous peoples, is a theme which ripples through this novel, but always as the background to the lives of the central characters rather than ever being foregrounded as an issue. In the novel’s opening introductory chapter the narrator tells the reader a little about the area where he grew up, including the following:

“I learned long ago to distrust local history. Darkwood, for instance, they will tell you at the Historical Society, is called Darkwood because of the darkness of the foliage, but it was not so long ago you could hear people call it Darkies’ Point, and not so long before that when Horace Clark’s grandfather went up there with his mates – all the old families should record this when they are arguing about who controls the shire – and pushed an entire tribe of aboriginal men and women and children off the edge.”

This shocking massacre is part of settler history, and no worthy of further exploration. While other writers might think this story worth telling, in this novel it is just window-dressing, local ‘colour’. Oscar and Lucinda are both European settlers, as is almost everyone else they meet or mix with, while the indigenous Australians are virtually voiceless. Towards the end of the novel there are some brief exceptions to this rule – Kumbaingiri Billy, for example, a friend of the narrator’s father, is introduced as the source of the story of the glass church – but overwhelmingly this novel is about the experience of colonial Australia, in which European settlers struggle to come to terms with the challenges of the new world. That settler experience is only part of the story of Australia. Australia wasn’t invented or discovered by Europeans – I am pretty sure it was there all along and had been inhabited by people for thousands of years. While Carey doesn’t ignore that fact he really doesn’t address it at any length either. It is only recently, in A Long Way from Home for example, that Carey has finally started to address face-on what he has called “the fundamental, bloody circumstance of my country”. In the promotional interviews for that novel Carey said that “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.” The fact is he managed to do just that in this novel. I know it might seem strange to critique the novel Carey hasn’t written, and I understand his reasons for not feeling qualified to write about the aboriginal experience, but I can’t help feeling it was a huge missed opportunity.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey 1988

Aside
Book review

“She is awake…”

That’s a great start to a novel! Who is ‘she’, and why is her awakening so important, so ominous? Sadly, after that this never really gets any better.

The Leviathan is set in Norfolk and is told in two threads, one set in a time of relative peace in 1703, and one sixty years earlier during the English Civil War. The narrator of both tales, Thomas Treadwater reflects on his time serving in Cromwell’s army. During a seasonal break in the fighting he returned home to nurse his wounds. His return was hastened by a letter from his sister who suspected a new servant of ‘drawing our father into corruptions’, alleging she was using witchcraft to do so. By the time Thomas reached their remote farm his father had had a stroke, the farm was in chaos, and the servant had been arrested on suspicion of being a witch. Thomas recollects his struggles to come to terms with what had happened as events snowball beyond his control.

There are a number of issues with The Leviathan, some of which I can discuss avoiding spoilers, others, sadly not. If that is likely to be a problem for you, and if you are planning to read the book, (and I admit, the premise is intriguing) don’t read on.

For a novel set in North Norfolk, an area of the country with a very specific geography, a sense of place is almost completely lacking. Apart from the fact that the Treadwater farm is set in remote countryside, we could be almost anywhere. What is so frustrating about this is that this part of the world has such a haunting atmosphere – huge skies, towering flint churches that seem wildly out of scale with their villages, coastal marshes and crumbling cliffs. Although most of the drainage windpumps that survive to this day were built later, at this time (i.e. in the seventeenth century) there would have been windmills stalking over across the flat landscape. What a missed opportunity this was. The sense of the period is captured very effectively – the world turned upside down – with parliament challenging the supreme authority of the monarch, but the sense of place is missing.

The novel opens as a fairly conventional story of witchcraft and witch-finding. The sinister and zealous Witchfinder Rutherford is introduced, but any expectation that he is going to be the novel’s villain is confounded when he goes missing, shortly after having proposed to Thomas’s young sister Esther. No-one seems particularly troubled by his absence, and that storyline is quietly dropped, as eventually is the witchcraft thread of the novel altogether. Why Esther would have accepted Rutherford’s proposal when she is – we later find out – not in any position to do so, is unexplained. Certainly the engagement is short lived! (Just to be clear, it is later suggested Esther had a sinister motive in accepting Rutherford, or in getting close to him, but the presentation of her acceptance is completely at odds with this motive. It appeared very inconsistent characterisation).

The introduction of John Milton to the novel as a character who helps resolve the mystery of the Leviathan is unconvincing and strange. He seems shoe-horned into the novel to provide it with some period detail, although his future as one of England’s greatest poets as well as his role as a radical figure within the Commonwealth Government goes largely unmentioned. Using historical figures as detectives in popular fiction has become a bit of a cliché recently, but Milton’s contribution to resolving the novel’s central mystery is in any event marginal. His presence is a wasted opportunity.

Thomas eventually finds out that his sister, Esther, has become possessed by a devil or demon. Their father rescued her from a shipwreck sixteen years earlier, and all this time the demonic entity has been lying dormant, sparked into life by the envy Esther feels towards her father’s new (and attractive) young servant. This makes some sense – Wikipedia tells me that Thomas Aquinas described the biblical Leviathan as the “demon of envy, first in punishing sinners”. But it is never made clear what the relationship is between the demonic entity that possesses Esther and the Leviathan itself, an enormous ship-crushing sea-monster. If I found The Essex Serpent disappointing in its non-existence, the literal appearance of the Leviathan was in many ways even more disappointing, and certainly less convincing. For horror to be effective it has to be credible, and while the ideas of witchcraft and possession have some basis in historical fact and can be explained by reference to actual phenomena, real-life sea-monsters summoned from the deep by demons are harder to believe.

My theory is that there was no sea monster, no Leviathan in the first draft of this novel. It was a story about witchcraft and possession, about faith and scepticism. The appearance of the great sceptic Milton in that novel makes complete sense. But then I suspect an editor read the novel in draft and suggested some changes that would make it more marketable (which to be fair is their job!). The book trade must have been looking for a successor to The Essex Serpent for some time (in the same way that I am sure editors are considering at this very moment the first chapters of The Tuesday Lunchtime Homicide Association penned by a moderately famous television presenter!). The Leviathan’s marketing leverages its apparent similarity to The Essex Serpent, not least in the serpentine design of the book’s cover. It’s not a coincidence that it was displayed in my local Waterstone next to copies of the Perry novel, nor that Goodreads describes it as “perfect for fans of The Essex Serpent.”

So The Leviathan 2.0 was (my theory goes) born, in which a storyline about a sea-serpent was grafted clumsily onto a witchcraft/demonic possession gothic horror novel. The joints show and creak. The remaining elements of the original horror story show some fairly obvious borrowing from nineteenth century gothic. As in Jane Eyre a mad-woman kept trapped in the attic breaks free and destroys the family home with fire. There’s also more than a hint of Wuthering Heights in the storyline whereby a foundling is taken in by a family living in a remote farmhouse who grows up with destructive urges, undermining the adoptive family from within.

There are some other issues with the unevenness of the narrative. When Thomas first returns to the family farm he sees dozens of sheep lying dead in the fields. The illness that has swept through the herds is quickly forgotten (as is the unpleasant job of disposing of the carcasses) and was obviously just added for atmosphere. Thomas’s infected and agonising war wound quickly disappears after a poultice is applied and he has a few days bed rest. And the end of the novel is confused and ambiguous. Gothic horror is always going to struggle in this context – either the author can resolve matters with a naturalistic/scientific explanation (it was the crusty old janitor wearing a mask all along) or the supernatural is real, witches and magic exists, and the reformation was all a lie. I’m not sure there is a correct answer to that conundrum, but if an author is going to invite us to believe in monsters and demons then they need to be summoned with a little more conviction.

The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews 2022

Aside
Book review

There are plenty of websites that claim to be able to teach you how to write a novel. I haven’t investigated them in any detail, but I know that they offer guidance on how to structure the plot of one’s novel – of course they do. I have a strong hunch that one of the plot structures they suggest (if they don’t, they really should) would consist of parallel timelines following the novel’s characters in the present,

The God of Small Things By Arundhati Roy

alternating with chapters set much earlier, before a significant event which marks a turning point in their lives. In the present they look back on said formative event with regret, perhaps not having been able to move on with their lives, still haunted by the past etc; in the past they approach the event with no idea what is coming, blithely unaware of how their lives are to be changed forever. We the reader will know and can see the innocent steps they take towards disaster through the prism of that knowledge, perhaps guided by a wistful ‘little did I know’ narrator. Better still, keep the detail of the ‘event’ vague – tease the reader with the idea that something terrible or disastrous is about to happen, but leave the details to the novel’s climax.

Does that sound familiar? Would you want to read a novel with that structure? Or does it sounds a little like writing by numbers, following a formula that you have read a thousand times before. It’s a little more interesting that a simple chronological series of events, but it has its flaws. For a start there is really not that much suspense – we know something is going to happen which will change our characters’ lives, even if we don’t know what precisely that event is, and we know more importantly that they come through it alive if not unscathed. Reading the novel becomes a matter of waiting for the ‘event’ to be revealed. That, in a nutshell, was my experience of reading The God of Small Things. It felt too mannered, too much like an exercise in creative writing, too artificial. It prevented me from becoming immersed in the text and in believing in the characters. Which was obviously a pity, because the author clearly has immense potential.

The God of Small Things is a classically fragmented narrative. It is constructed around two periods in the lives of twins Estha and Rahel: in 1969 when they are seven, and then in 1993 when they finally reunite after the traumatic incident that forms the heart of the novel. The twins come from a wealthy, Syrian-Christian family living in India and in the 1969 storyline live in an extended family with their mother Ammu, grandmother Mammachi, uncle Chacko, and great-aunt ‘Baby’ Kochamma. The narrative uses multiple perspectives and voices, but principally is shown through the naïve eyes of the children. The tragic events are set in motion when Margaret Kochamma, uncle Chacko’s ex-wife, comes to visit the family from England with her daughter, Sophie Mol. We learn as early as page 4 that Sophie dies in the course of the visit, but how she comes to die, and who is held responsible for her death, is not explained until towards the end of the novel.

In the present, the trauma of Sophie’s death, and the twins’ subsequent separation, still echoes. They both return to the family home, now much run-down, and resume an adult version of their childhood existence.

Roy’s prose is dense and at times wonderful. It is not unusual for her to use three images in one sentence. They can when this happens become crowded and lose their impact. Take this example from the novel’s first page for instance:

“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gunfire.”

Can ropes be like gunfire? Technically no, but of course the mind is agile enough to move from the initial metaphor (slanting silver ropes) to the simile (like gunfire) without being concerned with the apparent contradiction, in the same way we have no problem with Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles. Notice also the dead metaphor (ploughing) lurking there in between the two more obvious images. Out of context like this the writing stands out – we can see the monsoon rain slanting down and hitting the dry earth, pitting it with holes, but the cumulative effect of the imagery can be a bit wearying. When Roy avoids trying to assure the reader than everything is like something else, and just allows things to be what they are, the prose is far more effective:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.”

Compare this to when the imagery takes over:

“Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past.”

The novel’s Romeo and Juliet storyline, in which the taboo against relationships between Touchables and Untouchables is broken, is intertwined with the children’s excited memories of going to the cinema to see the Sound of Music, driving in the family car, and playing in the grounds of the family home. Here the river at the end of the garden represents a border between order and chaos, the known and the unknown, civilisation and barbarism. Once the reader acclimatises to the novel’s splintered structure it becomes as absorbing read – we know tragedy is about to strike but need to understand how and why. I have to say I found the novel’s ending its weakest element. It was gratuitous, a way of abruptly bringing the novel to a close when the story had run its course. But although the relationship between the twins is ostensibly the heart of the novel, there are many other themes, characters and relationships that were of greater interest and which outweigh the disappointing conclusion.

The God of Small Things (I should confess now that I still don’t properly understand what or who the titular God of Small Things was) is a wonderfully rich and rewarding novel. Perhaps it is too easy to mock some of the more obvious elements of ‘creative writing’ as I have done in the opening paragraphs of this review (John Crace does an excellent job of parodying the novel’s excesses in this review in the Guardian). And it is fair to say that it won the Booker in an exceptionally weak year (you are unlikely to have heard of any of the other short-listed novels). But don’t let that mislead you: it would have been a contender in any year. It joins and deserves its place among the many other Booker winning novels set in India, such as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, Paul Scott’s Staying On, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, and of course the Booker of Bookers, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

PS I am not a massive fan of trigger warnings, but there is a scene of child sex abuse in this novel that you probably ought to be aware of. It’s written from the child’s perspective (frightened and confused) and while admittedly it adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the novel in the run up to the tragedy, I am not convinced it was needed.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, 1997

Aside
Book review

The Water Dancer is a novel about slavery in America during the early nineteenth century. Anyone choosing to write about this topic has to decide early on how to convey the horror of slavery and how to bring the very familiar facts of the subject to life in a new way. Like Colson Whitehead in The Underground Railroad and Toni Morrison in Beloved, to name two relatively recent examples, Coates uses the supernatural to look afresh at this issue.

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The novel is narrated by Hiram (Hi) Walker. Hi was born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, the son of the white plantation owner and his black mother. His mother was sold when Hiram was young, as are increasing numbers of the plantation’s slaves as the value of the tobacco crop dwindles. Hiram has a photographic memory, with one big exception – he can remember almost nothing about his mother.

The novel opens when Hiram is in his late teens. Driving a carriage across a bridge he has a vision of his mother, which causes the carriage to crash into the river below, drowning his half-brother Maynard.

And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.

Hiram miraculously survives, seemingly by being transported out of the river onto the bank. This incident introduces Hiram’s super-power which Coates calls ‘conduction’, the ability to use memory to transport himself and others through space, a power that he eventually uses to rescue himself and others from slavery.

I must admit to feeling conflicted about this unusual metaphor. The real members of the underground railroad did not have super-powers. Escaping from slavery must have been a terrifyingly dangerous undertaking. Does it diminish the risks people took to describe them in this way? Aren’t the bare facts of the enterprise sufficiently dramatic without the need to overlay a supernatural element to what happened? In all other respects the novel is entirely naturalistic, (Wikipedia ridiculously calls it ‘surrealist’, which is just plain wrong) and it is only with this one element, which it takes Hiram a long time to harness, that the paranormal is invoked. I had no similar concerns with Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, in which the railroad was strikingly imagined as a literal train, so why the reservations here? I assume the point being made is that remembering one’s ancestry is the key to a person’s strength and thus to one’s freedom. But is it? Remembering where we came from is important, of course, but freedom for the enslaved in nineteenth century Virginia was a much more urgent, practical matter of life and death, an urgency that seems largely missing in The Water Dancer, where freedom can be gained by holding hands and wishing hard. Remembering the past is surely far more important to today’s descendants of the enslaved – although even as I write that I recognise it is hardly my place to tell them what is and isn’t important to them!

Appropriately, the plot of The Water Dancer meanders. There’s nothing hurried in the series of events which takes Hiram out of Virginia into the underground railroad organisation, where he meets Harriet Tubman, who like him can ‘conduct’ people to freedom. Tubman – an almost mythical figure known as Moses – is convincingly sketched, and becomes a mentor to Hiram. He eventually makes his way back To his father’s plantation, with a plan to help others escape from slavery, but settles into a role as his father’s carer and seems in no hurry to leave.

Sadly I just really didn’t care that much about Hiram. He didn’t come alive as a character (unlike Harriet Tubman – she was very well realised and I would have been happy to spend a lot more time following her adventures). The horrors of slavery are not directly confronted in this novel – even to the extent of the euphemistic indirect language used. Being enslaved is described as being ‘tasked’, which seems to drain much of the historic impact from the original term. Similarly enforced prostitution is described as going to ‘the fancy’. In this version of slavery, when slaves run away they are captured and resold rather than the brutality described in other accounts of the period. Hiram is not recognised legally as his father’s son, but is called his son nonetheless, and given privileges that are closer to those of a domestic servant rather than a slave. Perhaps that’s the point. At one stage he attends an abolitionist rally and meets people campaigning for many other types of freedom – marriage, gender, work, religion. Coates identifies an early version of white guilt amongst the abolitionists Hiram meets in the North:

“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”

Once Hiram discovers his conduction powers he does very little with them – it takes him almost all of the novel to perfect his abilities, and even then only one person is rescued. Similarly his photographic memory features only briefly in the novel – he uses it as a party trick before a gathering of Virginian slave-owners, who are impressed with his expertise. This scene like many others did not ring wholly true – surely the racist Southern gentry would have felt threatened by such an obvious demonstration of the enslaved’s intelligence, when their whole existence was predicated on the ideology that black people were sub-human?

I’ve got to be honest about my feelings about this book. There was plenty to enjoy, but the whole was much less than the sum of the parts. It had little or no suspense despite the extraordinarily dramatic setting, the plot dragged, and the supernatural elements seemed shoe-horned in for interest rather than forming the core of the novel. I hope there’s a lot more to come from this author and we can look back at this as a good first attempt, but of course that’s never guaranteed – we shall see.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2019

Aside
Book review

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

W B Yeats, The Second Coming

The standard reading, the academic consensus, sees Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart as a depiction of pre-colonial village life in Nigeria based upon a “coherent social structure forming the institutional fabric of a universe of meanings and values.” This analysis goes on to argue that:

“because this image of Africa was quite unprecedented in literature, it also carried considerable ideological weight in the specific context of the novel’s writing and reception. For it cannot be doubted that the comprehensive scope of Achebe’s depiction of a particularized African community engaged in its own social processes, carried out entirely on its own terms, with all the internal tensions this entailed, challenged the simplified representation that the West offered itself of Africa as a formless area of life, as “an area of darkness” devoid of human significance”.

(The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, by F Abiola Irele).

Putting it more simply, the portrait of a complex, structured society in pre-colonial West Africa is characterised as a refutation of the racist myth – seen for example in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but obviously not originating there – that this part of Africa was uncivilised and its people ‘savages’. Things Fall Apart shows us, if we needed showing, that life in West Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans in large numbers in the late nineteenth century was not ‘devoid of significance’, not a world of savage brutality. It had rules and obligations, a system of justice, artistic achievement, codes of ethics and morality.

I am not sure if you read Things Fall Apart without an awareness of this conventional interpretation you would draw this conclusion. Because the novel portrays tribal life as brutal in the extreme. Toxic masculinity means women are treated as possessions, punished violently for any infringements of their husband’s wishes or society’s arbitrary rules. Family life is devoid of what we think of as the natural affections between family members. Infanticide is not just tolerated but mandated in some circumstances such as the birth of twins. This is a violent, misogynistic society in which life is hard, violence is ever-present, and affection rare. Any temptation to romanticise tribal culture will find little encouragement here.

In fact Things Fall Apart dares to suggest that the arrival of white men and in particular missionaries was a positive thing for some Africans. The markets now have goods on sale that were previously impossible to find. The missionaries educate the children, and provide sanctuary for the people previously rejected by the tribe:

“There were many men and women in Umuofia who did not feel as strongly as Okonkwo about the new dispensation. The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuoifa.” (chapter 21)

The novel is set in Nigeria in the late nineteenth century, and through the life of one man, Okonkwo, shows how life changes with the arrival of the missionaries, Okonkwo has three wives and ten children and is a man of high status within his tribe. He is haunted by the need to be a better man than his weak father. He works hard farming yams, and is tyrannical and violent towards his family. A turning point in the novel arrives when he is appointed as the guardian of teenage boy taken in effect as a hostage, as part of a peace settlement with another clan, a traditional method of avoiding a wider conflict. The boy lives with his family for several years, and they grow close, but unexpectedly the village elders decide that that he must be killed. Okonkwo carries out this sentence as a demonstration of his masculinity. This traumatic murder (although not deemed as such by the villagers) is hard for Okonkwo to come to terms with. A little while later he accidentally kills another man (his aging gun explodes at a funeral – the villagers obviously have some Western artefacts, although their source is unclear) and his whole family is exiled.

While he is in exile, rumours reach him of the arrival of white men in the area. At first it is thought this is a mistake – that the men are possibly albinos – but the rumours are confirmed. The missionaries build a church and start to convert people to Christianity. The villagers have to choose – to fight back and expel the white men, with possibly violent consequences, or trust in their own gods, who they believe will expel the white men on their own, at a time of their choosing. Okonkwo is in favour of a violent, aggressive response, particularly once his son Nwoye starts to become interested in the new religion. A mild response to an insult with tribal customs and beliefs is met by Okonkwo and other village leaders being taken prisoner. War appears inevitable but Okonkwo’s leadership is not followed and he soon faces an impossible choice.

Seen simply as a response to Conrad, Things Fall Apart is unconvincing. The racist imagery of Africa as the ‘dark continent’ peopled by savages never suggested the continent was entirely devoid of any form of civilisation. Education was widely unavailable, material and scientific development was a long way behind European standards, and the villagers subsistence way of life was very vulnerable to drought or other natural disasters (hence I suspect the taboo around twins – two mouths to feed at the same time would be too many?). But Europeans’ main concern about this way of life would have been the absence of Christianity, from which all other sins – infanticide for example – could be said to have derived.

Things Fall Apart is a much more nuanced novel than this interpretation suggests. It chronicles the end of a way of life that seemed to have little to commend it. It’s hardly surprising that Achebe, baptised with the forename Albert, the son of Christian converts and the beneficiary of a Christian education, would have not looked back on tribal life with much of a sense of nostalgia. If you are looking for a reductionist ‘colonialism = bad, African = good” narrative this novel will disappoint. That colonialism was destructive for traditional African society but in its wake brought some benefits is a less black and white interpretation than the novel usually attracts. The novel’s title, and the poem from which it derives, suggest that colonialism signalled the arrival of a blood-dimmed tide upon Africa’s shores. The second coming may not be the moment of redemption that Christians believe it to be, but it’s equally not the apocalypse of Revelations either.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 1958

Aside
Book review

Anyone who has seen him wildly ad-libbing on Would I Lie to You will know that as well as being a wonderful comic Bob Mortimer is also a brilliant story-teller. It’s a pity therefore that his childhood provides such depressing material for the opening half of this his autobiography. His dad died unexpectedly when he was young, and his mum struggled to support the family of four sons in working class Middlesbrough. The sad clown trope in which the comedian’s childhood insecurities are compensated for by comedy voices and routines (impersonations of teachers being a favourite) is very often a feature of similar accounts. But Bob was too shy even for that role. He’s very frank about how difficult these years were for him, but what is surprising is how long he struggled with this aspect of his personality. I found it genuinely sad that his footballing abilities didn’t provide an outlet for him – although he played for the Middlesbrough boys team for several years he tells us he hardly shared more than a dozen words with his teammates off the pitch. He later describes his time at Sussex university as the most difficult years of his life and that “throughout my entire three years at Sussex I never spoke to another law student. I talked in tutorials but as soon as they finished I was away back to my room to listen to my records.”

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The opening chapters of this absorbing autobiography are interspersed with an up-to-date chronicle of Bob’s heart problems, which brought a very sudden taste of his mortality. In childhood we have to come to terms with the inevitability of our own deaths, but we are able to treat it as sufficiently distant as to be an abstract concept, something that will happen one day but is not too frightening. But in later mid-life, with an unambiguous and critical diagnosis, it becomes a much more immediate reality. Bob response to the dawning realisation that he was not going to be around in ten or twenty years was to try to make the most of what time he had left. And to go fishing with his friend Paul Whitehouse. If you haven’t seen it Gone Fishing is wonderfully relaxing and contemplative comedy.

And Away… is admittedly fragmented. I got the impression that however hard Bob tried to be honest, he edits the story of his younger years to sanitise them. I can’t blame him for not wanting to dwell overly long on moments of his life best left behind, (not least because he would in doing so give away the ‘true or false’ answers to some of the more ridiculous anecdotes on Would I Lie to You) and he hurries on to the transformative moment when he meets his comedy partner, Vic Reeves. These are obviously the days Bob remembers with particular fondness, allowing him to leave behind a legal career he clearly wasn’t that interested in and to develop a stage persona in which he felt more comfortable than in his own skin. Imposter syndrome is possibly an exaggerated way of describing the common feeling that we don’t quite deserve the success we achieve and Bob certainly shares this feeling – it is almost as if he can’t quite believe his luck in getting to share the stage and screen with Vic, and would never want to emerge from his role as sidekick where he feels he belongs. He tells the story of their amazing success on television almost as a fan would describe it, a series of lucky breaks and undeserved second series, rather than the reward for hard work and comedic talent.

Bob comes across on television as a decent, genuinely likeable and yet humble man, someone who it would be wonderful to go for a beer with. This memoir confirms that impression without really giving the reader any new insights. Perhaps autobiographies are always going to hide as much as they reveal, which is why we wait for biographies for the real warts-and-all revelations.

And Away…, by Bob Mortimer, 2021

Aside
Book review

A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, 1993

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first, because seemingly it’s mandatory for every review of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy to mention its length. The paperback edition is over 1500 pages long, which makes it easily the longest single edition novel I have ever read (Clarissa was longer but came in 12 editions so isn’t a fair comparison). Apart from the fact that the book was slightly cumbersome to handle, for me this wasn’t really an issue. If you were reading it to a deadline for a review or coursework then I can appreciate the concern, but otherwise I am not sure why all reviews seem to obsess about the length. The impression I have is that Seth was determined to ignore the traditional ‘rules’ of novel writing, so if the novel ran to 1500 pages then so be it, not his problem (he displayed the same rule-breaking approach when he wrote his 1986 novel The Golden Gate entirely in verse).

A Suitable Boy is set in India in the early 1950’s, a few years after independence from the UK and the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. Partition was a traumatic and violent event for the people of the region, with tens of millions displaced and hundreds of thousands (on a low estimate) killed in communal violence. The immediate days and weeks of independence have been explored at length by writers such as Salman Rushdie (in Midnight’s Children), so the setting of A Suitable Boy in the early but not immediate post-colonial period provides a fresh perspective. The India described in A Suitable Boy is in the circumstances remarkably calm and law-abiding compared to that of a few years earlier. Partition has still left its mark – families are separated and communal violence remains a threat – but overall things are remarkably calm, even to the extent that a national election can take place. Hindu and Muslim families on the whole do not intermarry, but they mostly live alongside one another in relative peace.

Asuitableboy.jpg

To explore this world the novel follows the interwoven stories of four families: the Khans, Mehras, Chatterjis and Kapoors. Seth helpfully provides a detailed family tree at the opening of the book which I regularly referred to. If such a diffuse novel can be said to have a central narrative it is probably that of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s search for a ‘suitable boy’ for her daughter, Lata, an intelligent and independent 19-year-old undergraduate (to be honest, this storyline is usually deemed the central narrative simply because of its connection to the novel’s title rather than because it dominates the book or holds it together.) Rather than meekly accepting her mother’s decisions, Lata has her own views on whom she should marry. Her bullying brother, Arun, also tries to intervene and influence her choice. Three suitors emerge, all with various complications. Kabir Durrani is a cricket-playing student. He is charming and kind, and Lata quickly falls in love with him, but he is a Muslim so, according to her family, he is out of the question. Haresh Khanna is an ambitious young man employed by a local shoe-making company, but he has a former lover who remains in his heart, and he is dismissed by some members of Lata’s family as a ‘cobbler’. To complete the trio of suitors, Amit Chatterjee (Lata’s brother’s brother-in-law) is part of the extended Mehra family and therefore in many ways more suitable than the others. Amit is an acclaimed poet and author, clearly modelled on Seth himself. The novelist is brutally honest about Amit’s/his own failings and unsuitability as a potential husband.

This isn’t really a love story though. Lata’s romantic interests provide a narrative thread of sorts, but for long stretches the novel diverts into a wide variety of other topics and themes, from considerations of land reform, the Congress Party, elections, the Hindu/Muslim conflicts that continued throughout this period, as well as following the personal stories of a wide cast of peripheral characters. By ‘peripheral’ I mean that while they are not central to the core narrative, Seth doesn’t treat them as such, to the extent that the whole concept of a central narrative is flawed. All of these characters are brought to life and given time to develop their own stories. This seems part of Seth’s determination not to follow the traditional structures of the Western novel, but to write about what interests him. If it leads down a narrative rabbit hole then so be it; if the novel balloons to an incredible length, then it does.

Two of these ‘minor’ characters in particular stood out for me: Maan Kapoor, Lata’s brother-in-law (technically her sister’s brother-in-law) and Meenakshi Mehra nee Chatterji, wife to Arun and sister-in-law to Lata (and yes, in case you were wondering, I did just check the family trees to make sure I got this right). Maan is a playboy who becomes besotted with Saeeda Bai, a musical ‘courtesan’ – in other words a high-class prostitute. Through this storyline the reader is introduced to the complex sexual morality of India. While some women were kept virtually imprisoned in purdah, not allowed to show their faces to any man other than immediate family members, and forbidden from even going outside, other women such as Saeeda are allowed to sing at high-class social events without causing scandal, protected by the status of their customers. The double standards are shown, but Seth doesn’t moralise explicitly. Saeeda’s position is insecure – she knows that if she loses the patronage of some of her most senior ‘lovers’ she will be quickly ostracised by society. Later in the novel it is revealed that Maan had gay relationships while at boarding school and occasionally continues his long standing relationship with Firoz Khan, a school friend. He is in other words secretly bisexual. This secrecy is needed because being gay at the time in India in theory could lead to a life-long prison sentence, and would have been immensely damaging to his father’s political career. (His father is a minister in the Indian Government). Extraordinarily, homosexuality was only decriminalised in India in 2018 even though Hindu culture has a long tradition of recognising the complexity of human sexuality.

Meenakski is an interesting contrast to Saeeda and Maan. Although married she conducts a love-affair with one of her husband’s friends in which she is clearly the dominant party – she pressures him into liaisons and refuses to allow the relationship to lapse, apparently reckless or unafraid of the social stigma and other consequences that would ensue were they to be discovered. She is sexually liberated, and appears to enjoy her affair consequence-free – at one point she does fall accidentally pregnant, but loses the baby to a miscarriage and is secretly pleased at this outcome. The novel doesn’t pass judgment on Meenakski. As with Saeeda Bai her decisions are shown but not condemned.

Towards the end of the text Seth comes close to breaking the fourth wall when Amit, his avatar within the novel, is asked about the length of his own forthcoming novel. It is easy to imagine that this was a question Seth had to answer many times when his publishers released details of the page count of A Suitable Boy:

‘Do you believe in the virtue of compression?’ ‘Well, yes’, said Amit warily. The lady was rather fat.

‘Why then is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel – to be set, I understand, in Bengal, is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!’ she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.

‘Oh, I don’t know how it grew to be so long’ said Amit. ‘I’m very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse, If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch’. (Don’t we all?)

This is Seth’s response to the commentary about the novel’s lack of ‘compression’ – to mock his critics who are unable to bear the weight of the book or to read it without going into their own version of purdah.

Mostly the narrative is gently paced, following the lives of the characters wherever they end up. Periodically there are major events that in a traditional novel would be used to drive the narrative forward. I don’t think it is a coincidence that these dramatic incidents are used to end episodes of the television adaptation of the novel, providing cliff-hangers to ensure viewers return the following week. There is a tragedy at the annual pilgrimage to the Ganges (in the novel, the event is called “Pul Mela” instead of “Kumbh Mela”) which is based on a real event from 1954 in which hundreds of people were crushed to death. Although one of the novel’s minor characters is injured in the crush there are no long-term consequences – he recovers fully. Later another character is stabbed, but while at one point it is thought he might die, there are no long-term injuries and the attacker is cleared of any wrong-doing. Time and again events such as Meenakski’s pregnancy or Kabir’s declaration of love for Lata, which in other novels would be major turning points, turn out to be false starts, and things quickly return back to normal. I am not sure how to interpret this – it could be that Seth is making a broader point about Indian history and its future. Despite the many events that shook national life at the time the country quickly returns back to normality. It persists and survives.

Unsurprisingly, the novel contains a lot of detail about traditional Hindu festivals, traditions and ceremonies. Largely these are just shown to the reader – there’s no real attempt by the narrator to explain their purpose or background. This means the reader either heads off to the internet to do some background reading (making a long read even longer!) or goes with the flow and accepts the traditions as background colour which are important to some of the characters (others treat them with disdain) but not essential to an understanding of the plot.

Although the main story-lines are resolved by the end of the 1500 pages, much is left unsaid. This means the novel functions largely as a portrait of Indian life in the early 1950’s rather than a conventional story. When it was first published some reviews of A Suitable Boy compared it to epic nineteenth century novels such as War and Peace. I’m not sure such comparison are helpful. A Suitable Boy spans only around eighteen months, focuses on domestic rather than national events (national events without question feature in the novel, but they act more as a backdrop rather than as the focus of the narrative) and in some ways is closer to a soap-opera than a dynastic saga. I suspect it was this structure which made it an obvious choice for a television series rather than a film adaptation. Ultimately one has to admire the novelist’s determination to write the novel that he was interested in, rather than accepting the conventions of a genre which have developed over time (arguably in the interests of publishers rather than readers?). A Suitable Boy will reward the time you have to invest in it. It is an engrossing portrait of India which should not be rushed.

A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, 1993

Aside
Book review

“People change,’ she said
‘Oh, no they don’t. Look at me. I’ve never changed. It’s like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you’ll still read Brighton. That’s human nature.”

Greene’s 1938 novel of gang warfare in Brighton pulls off a rare achievement – it is at

Brighton Rock By Graham Greene

once both an adventure story and a serious mediation on good and evil. I was blown away by it; not necessarily by the plot (the ending is largely predictable) but by the quality of the prose. Greene’s control of language is masterful throughout, and virtually every sentence is a gem.

Charles Hale comes to Brighton to distribute cards for a newspaper competition. Hale has somehow underestimated the antipathy felt for him by a local gang, a mistake he quickly comes to regret. The novel tells the reader as much with the ominous opening line:

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him”.

To avoid being isolated by the gang who begin tracking him through the crowds of day-trippers, Fred picks up Ida Arnold, visiting Brighton for the races. This helps keep the gang at arms length, but he is then briefly separated from her, long enough for them lead him away to his fate.

Pinkie Brown, (also known as The Boy), is the leader of the gang that murders Hale. Pinkie struggles through the remainder of the novel to avoid the consequences of this killing. Although he has carefully planned the timing of his alibi, things quickly unravel. One gang member, Spicer, is tasked with distributing Hale’s leftover cards around Brighton in order to confuse any investigation into the timing of his death. But a witness, Rose, the waitress at a café, sees him leaving one of Hale’s cards, and is able to identify him. Pinkie knows that the waitress’s evidence could reveal his complicity in Hale’s murder. Rose is an innocent and vulnerable 16 year old, a fellow Roman Catholic, and she falls into a destructive and abusive relationship with Pinkie.

Pinkie is the novel’s central character, and much of the story is told from his perspective. He is a highly damaged individual – only 17 years old and already a killer. We are told repeatedly that he doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and is a virgin. He inherited control of the gang following the death of the original leader Kite in a fight on St Pancras station, and rules the gang through fear of his instability and propensity for sudden violence. As well as his weapon of choice, a razor blade, he carries around a bottle of acid (“vitriol”) with which he threatens Rose. He aims to silence her with fear, before later deciding to marry her, as wives were unable to testify against their husbands law at the time.

The police are peripheral figures in Brighton Rock – a gang fight at the races doesn’t merit an investigation; neither does Spicer’s obviously suspicious death. Pinkie is floundering with the challenges of his new role – his immaturity is emphasised by his diminutive nickname. The local police persuade a witness to an attack by the gang to withdraw his evidence, make a mess of the investigation into Hale’s death, if any, and encourage Pinkie to join forces with the mobster planning to take over his territory.

Hale’s death does not go completely uninvestigated however. Ida Arnold, who was with him moments before his murder, doesn’t believe the inquest verdict, and decides to try to discover how he came to die. The novel’s narrative voice consistently if gently mocks Ida, but she sets about the investigation in a very systematic manner, following up leads and persuading the local police to let her see the report into Hale’s death. She takes all the steps that one would expect a traditional investigator to follow, including starting at the scene of the crime and attempting to trace Hale’s contacts on the day. But we are encouraged throughout despite all the evidence to the contrary to see Ida as a clumsy, rather foolhardy figure.

Ida is a fascinating character. The narrator tells the reader that

“You thought of sucking babies when you looked at her”

says she has

“A touch of nursery and the mother”

and describes

“Her Guinness kindness”.

In other words she is the last person one would expect to bravely confront murderous gangsters and bring them to justice. But she does just that. I can’t think of any other character in fiction to can compare to Ida. Women in detective and thriller stories usually are given a subordinate role, and those that do feature are usually young and sexually attractive. The exceptions – Miss Marple for example – are usually shown as eccentric and devoid of sexuality. Ida’s actions consistently undercuts the narrator’s depiction of her as an ineffective slightly comic figure.

The novel also contains a serious discussion on the Christian concepts of good and evil, damnation and salvation, without being in any way didactic. Rose is terrified that she might be damned, but is prepared to lose her mortal soul for the sake of Pinkie; Pinkie is certain about the existence of hell, but less convinced about its counterpart:

“But you do believe, don’t you,” Rose implored him, “you think it’s true?”
“Of course it’s true,” the Boy said. “What else could there be?” he went scornfully on. “Why,” he said, “it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,” he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, “torments.”
“And Heaven too,” Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.
“Oh, maybe,” the Boy said, “maybe.”

Pinkie is a Roman Catholic and knows that his crimes are sins for which a price will be paid at some point. Ida is the counterpoint to Pinkie in the novel. Her ideas about sin are in stark contrast to Pinkie’s – she says:

“It doesn’t do anyone any harm that I know of. It’s human nature…It’s only fun after all…fun to be human.

Reflecting on an afternoon of sex with her gentleman friend Corkery:

“She knew what was right and what was wrong. God didn’t mind a bit of human nature – what he minded – and her brain switched away from Phil in pants to her mission, to doing good, to seeing that evil suffered”.

All these elements come together in the climax of the novel with extraordinary pace and flair. The thriller element of the story is highly effective, and perfectly balanced with the ideas about morality – the two elements complement one another rather than providing a distraction. Without the discussion of good versus evil this would just be a quite limited detective story, albeit one that introduces a new kind of amateur detective to fiction. Without the detective element this would be a tedious debate about what makes people commit crimes. Together they form a compelling story.

There’s much else of interest in this novel. The prose is luxurious and complex without being in any way obscure. For his gangster characters Greene adopts a limited version of Polari – a slang dialect initially derived from travellers which in the 1950’s became popular within the gay community to allow ideas to be openly discussed without being overheard or understood by others.

The novel is crowded with vividly realised portraits of characters, especially Pinkie’s gang and their base at Frank’s. For example, Pinkie’s rival, Colleoni, is an aging Italian mobster

“in glace shoes, with a white slip to his waistcoat and a jewelled pin”

who stays at the Cosmopolitan, a world away from Frank’s, the seedy boarding house which acts as the base for Pinkie’s gang. Frank’s telephone number is 666, either Greene’s or Pinkie’s joking reference to Revelations and the number of the beast. There is also a strong sense of place about the novel – the streets of Brighton and the local landmarks are vividly captured.

At the close, Greene provides us with an understanding of the cruel events of the novel, in a line quoted in Jed Bartlett’s extraordinary Two Cathedrals speech from the West Wing:

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the…appalling…strangeness of the mercy of God.”

But there is still time for one last shock, as Greene allows Rose to discover Pinkie’s true feelings toward her, described as “the worst horror of all”.

Brighton Rock is a magnificent, rewarding, complex book that demands to be read and reread for a long time. It has its flaws, but in my view is one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, 1938

Aside