Tag Archives: Book review

Book review

The Power, by Naomi Alderman, 2016

Many of the great dystopian novels have at their centre what amounts to a thought experiment – a ‘What If….?’ What if women were enslaved and used to breed children? What if totalitarianism ruled our lives? What if our obsession with technology distorts society to remove all meaningful human relationships? And so on. Alderman’s master-stroke in ‘The Power‘ is to imagine a new and compelling ‘What If?’ – what would happen if women had the ability to generate electric shocks from their bodies? What if they literally had ‘the power’? What would that do to gender relationships in society? Would women be free from sexism, oppression, sexual violence and so on? Ultimately, would the world be a better place?

Alderman uses a rather clumsy framing device to provide a structure to the narrative. The novel is book-ended with correspondence between a male historian turned author and a female editor. He seeks her comments on and support for his novel, ‘The Power’. He is attempting to find a wider audience for his archaeological findings by turning them into a novel, recreating the world he has discovered . She patronises him, finding the scenes of female on male sexual violence and the idea of male soldiers “sexy”. She suggests the novel is published under a male pseudonym, in an ironic inversion of a practice in publishing that still survives to this day. Their letters are written several thousand years after the central events of the novel. The historian’s theory, given imaginative form in the novel, is that women have not always had ‘the power’, and in earlier pre-power societies men were the dominant sex. He describes the period when women’s electrical abilities first emerged, and the events leading up to the global war which followed.

This framing technique is not new of course – Margaret Atwood (who mentored Alderman during the writing of this novel) does something similar at the end of the Handmaid’s Tale, as does Orwell at the end of 1984, but the impact of the device in both is different, distancing the reader from the grim dystopias, and offering hope that the world has changed. In The Power, Alderman both opens and closes the novel with the correspondence, so we are aware while reading the novel that things don’t end well – chapters headings even have a grim countdown to the apocalypse to emphasise the point. Between chapters are illustrations of archaeological finds. The historian ‘author’ speculates on their purpose, often wildly inaccurately. Alderman has some fun here – for example she talks about the mysterious meaning of the ‘bitten fruit logo’, although this ignorance of twenty-first century technology is not really consistent with the story within the story, in which email and smart-phones are fully understood.

The central narrative is told through the intersecting stories four main characters: Roxy, the daughter of a British drug baron; Margot, mayor of an unnamed city in the United States; Allie, a teenage girl in an abusive foster home in Alabama; and Tunde, a young male Nigerian journalist. Tunde stumbles into journalism driven by a need to understand ‘the power’, and through his efforts the reader sees the its impact on countries around the world. In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the changes are literally revolutionary. Allie is at the heart of the development of a new religion focussed on women and their new powers, reinterpreting Christian theology with a fresh emphasis on the role of women. Margot’s story shows the impact of the power on politics and the military-industrial complex – the military possibilities of the power are quickly identified. Finally Roxy’s story shows how organized crime reacts to the opportunities of the changes within society. These disparate narratives converge, improbably, on the newly declared central European nation of Bessapara, which becomes the focus for their stories and the stage on which a new world order begins to emerge.

At first, the power liberates women. No longer frightened of the men in their lives, they begin to take control. The reversal of roles happens quickly – stripped of their power to physically dominate women, men become subservient. This is shown in some obvious ways – there is a scene when women soldiers rape some young men – but also in subtler ways, such as the male newsreader who claims not to understand the political stories he is covering, and is relieved to turn to lighter news or the traffic reports.

The central concept of ‘The Power‘ is remarkably effective. It is thought-provoking and challenging. It locates the oppression of women in their physical weakness relative to men, and asks what would happen if that situation were to be reversed? Whether women’s oppression is solely down to this issue or is rooted in other causes is probably beyond the scope of this review, but what is interesting to me is that Alderman argues quite explicitly that once women have the upper hand, they behave just as badly and oppressively as men. They abuse their physical superiority to strip men of their human rights, to demean them, to torture, humiliate and assault them. Women are not the gentle sex here, they are just weaker, and as soon as that changes they exact revenge. As a mediation on the relationships between the sexes and their capacity to change, this is therefore ultimately a pessimistic book. It argues that human power is not located in the rules by which we agree to conduct civil society, but in our brute strength and ability to harm one another:

“It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.”

Furthermore that physical power cannot be trusted in the hands of either sex. Women’s liberation in these circumstances becomes impossible. Their oppression is caused by their physical weakness relative to men (the author suggests) and there is no mysterious electrical power that is going to spontaneously emerge and liberate them – but even if there were, that freedom would be at the expense of men, civil society, and peace.

The contrast with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is stark. We believe that Atwood’s world is possible, not least because it is drawn from the real-life oppression of women. Women can be freed from Gilead not through any superhuman or supernatural external forces, but through their own actions (and those of their allies). Atwood’s novel is therefore at the same time both more chilling and more optimistic about the future of our species.

I am left wondering, worrying – have I misunderstood the allegory of ‘The Power‘? Does a novel that ostensibly seeks to imagine a world in which women do not have to fear men really end up by concluding that such a world is impossible, unattainable? In a way I hope so.

Standard
Book review

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, 2020

It feels as if I am the last book blogger on the planet to get round to reading this magnificent novel. I am more than happy to join in with the praise this wonderful book has been showered with, because it is extraordinarily powerful, easily the best novel I have read this year.

Even if you had managed to avoid any of the publicity about this novel, you would know its subject matter from the title. Described in the Guardian review as the “tragic tale of the Latin tutor’s son” (which cleverly highlights the novel’s way of looking at the story with a fresh pair of eyes) Hamnet is about many things, but at its heart this is a novel about grief. How people process loss, how it impacts us differently (particularly poignant was the scene when Judith, Hamnet’s twin sister, asks her mother what the word is for a bereaved twin – after all we have words for orphans and widows). I have never read a book where the rawness of grief is conveyed so powerfully – I sobbed. Written in the present tense it has an immediacy that gives the scenes of loss such impact, and of course the fact we are now living through another pandemic, gladly one a lot less dangerous than the plague of the middle ages, goes to emphasise the tragedy in an unexpected and dramatic way.

But it’s not just about grief. It is an extraordinarily evocative recreation of late sixteenth century rural Warwickshire (London is also summoned up vividly, but it is not the focus of the novel). The extended Shakespeare and Hathaway families are brought to life – and while this novel sent me back to the internet time after time to check various details of their lives (those we know, of course) I didn’t resent that in the slightest. One of its many strengths is that this book isn’t over-researched – it takes the little we know about Shakespeare’s family background and life, and fills in the gaps imaginatively and convincingly. O’Farrell is happy to take risks and present less popular versions of the story – the idea that Will and Anne met while he was tutoring her step brothers in Latin for example. I loved the way the novel rescues Anne Hathaway from the condescension of history and reinvents her as a wise confident young woman. I also think it was a brave decision to foreground Anne (known here as Agnes, the name her father uses for her in his will, apparently) rather than Shakespeare, who remains unnamed throughout the novel.

The mystery of the relationship between Hamnet and the play in his name written just a few years later (O’Farrell mentions only briefly the fact that Shakespeare is believed to have written some of his best comedies in between the two events) is one that invites speculation. Was Shakespeare simply callous, indifferent to the feelings of his family, or (as O’Farrell compellingly speculates here) using the play to explore his grief for his lost son? Other family relationships and characters – the bullying glove-maker John Shakespeare, or Will’s mysterious brother Edward (here Edmond) are all brought to life vividly.

There are many gaps in what we know about Shakespeare. Why did he live long parts of his life in London and not bring his family to live with him, even when he was financially successful? What impact did these long periods of separation have on his marriage. How did he go from being the son of a glove-maker to a phenomenally successful playwright? Why on earth did he leave his second-best bed to his wife in his will? And most of all, what impact did the loss of his son have on his work? Although this is not Shakespeare’s story, along the way O’Farrell acknowledges these many mysteries and provides thought-provoking answers. Which means you can enjoy this novel if you know all there is to know about Shakespeare, or nothing.

I can’t recommend this novel highly enough. I suspect it will go on to win many more awards than the entirely merited Women’s Prize for Fiction it was awarded earlier this year against stiff opposition.

PS The season finale of series three of Upstart Crow, the David Mitchell/Ben Elton BBC sit-com about Shakespeare featured Hamnet’s death. In this episode Judith falls in first, Shakespeare is sent for from London, and between this message being sent and his arriving home Judith recovers and Hamnet has fallen ill and died, the exact sequence O’Farrell follows here. It’s well done in both versions, but I can’t find any evidence or source for this version other than here. I wonder whether the television programme acted as a spark of inspiration for this part of O’Farrell’s story? The programme ends with this apposite and poignant speech from King John:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows’ cure!

King John, Act 3 scene 4

Standard
Book review

Wintersmith, (Discworld 35) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2006

Wintersmith (Discworld Novels) by Sir Terry Pratchett - Paperback - from World of Books Ltd (SKU: GOR001210366)

The Tiffany Aching series of novels gave Discworld a wonderful burst of new life – almost half of the last dozen novels in the series were Tiffany stories. We have followed Tiffany’s story since she was nine, and her training as a witch now sees her placed with Miss Treason, a 113-year old witch renowned for her dark and mysterious powers (which Tiff quickly works out are simply “boffo”, or as Granny Weatherwax would put it, headology. )

Unusually for Pratchett the novel opens with the novel’s climax, and then takes the reader back to the story’s origins. This structure isn’t a problem – it allows the reader to navigate the plot more easily when we know the destination, and is one of the more telling signs that this is a story for younger readers. Tiffany’s problems begin when she goes to observe the traditional “dark morris” dance which welcomes in the winter, Tiffany spontaneously joins the dance, interrupting the passage of the seasons between the two elementals, the Wintersmith and the Summer Lady—the personification of summer. The Wintersmith has never met anyone like Tiffany before, and once the dance is over determines to become a mortal and seek her out, using their spiritual connection forged over Tiff’s silver horse pendant.

This disruption of the natural order of things isn’t going to go well. With the help of the Feegles, and the loving support of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, Tiffany has to put things right. It’s not easy when you are being wooed by someone who can make all snowflakes in your image – and icebergs as well! At first Tiff takes refuge in Lancre, and the warm embrace of Nanny Ogg’s cottage, but the elemental Wintersmith is going to track her down.

Like most young adult novels, Wintersmith is really about growing up. Teenage Tiffany has to work through many of the problems and issues young teenagers face. Her fledgling romance with Roland, the Baron’s son (who she rescued in the first novel in the series, The Wee Free Men) is coming along nicely, but she has to battle to keep it private from the feegles and the witches. Speaking of battles, maintaining any sense of privacy from feegles (who take their geas to protect their ‘big wee hag’ very seriously) and witches who can see through her eyes isn’t easy. Later she has to come to terms with the death of an older character. Her place in her peer group is delicately balanced, and she manages to do the right thing and find her place in that hierarchy despite being aware of the subtle manipulations of Granny Weatherwax. Finally, she takes responsibility for her own actions when the temptation to shift the blame or hide behind others is overwhelming. While she may be flawed we are never in any doubt that Tiff will do the right thing and that will bring its own reward:

“It was lonely on the hill, and cold. And all you could do was keep going. You could scream, cry, and stamp your feet, but apart from making you feel warmer, it wouldn’t do any good. You could say it was unfair, and that was true, but the universe didn’t care because it didn’t know what “fair” meant. That was the big problem about being a witch. It was up to you. It was always up to you.”

I love it when Pratchett has the confidence to make such epic characters as Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg minor players in Tiffany’s story. The feegles are an endless delight, and there are some interesting new characters, not least 113 year-old Miss Treason, who wonderfully calls Granny “the girl Weatherwax”. Arguably the novel’s only weak spot is its fairly innocuous ending, but as I always say whoever reads Pratchett for his plots is really missing the point. I don’t think I read these novels with any particular care when they were first published, unwisely seeing them as books for younger readers, (which of course they are) but wrongly concluding there would be little in them for older readers. I am so glad to have got that wrong.

Standard
Book review

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup, by J L Carr, 1975

J L Carr’s A Month in the Country is an under-appreciated masterpiece. The slightly earlier How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup shows some of the promise seen in full bloom in the later novella, but has a comedic, not to say comic, premise that holds the author back from revealing his full potential.

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The F. A. Cup by J L Carr

The idea of a small village team winning the FA Cup is drawn directly from the pages of virtually every comic for boys ever written (the whole sub-genre is brilliantly caricatured in Viz’s Billy the Fish). Steeple Sinderby features every cliche from the genre going – the washed up ex-pro, the gifted midfielder with a tragic backstory, the unnaturally talented goalie with prehensile abilities, and the mysterious east European tactical genius.

I read once that J K Rowling hated having to write the scenes in her Harry Potter novels describing Quidditch matches (which explains why they were often called off). Carr may have felt trapped by the same logic of his scenario, because as the story progresses and the club proceed relentlessly to the final, the football games themselves become almost a sideshow. There is some fun with parodies of different commentary and reporting styles (In their primal gladiatorial tourney N. Baddesley jousting on their own bailiwick encountered the full and furious blast of Steeple Sinderby’s New Look Lads spearheaded by Sid Swift, long-lost Shooting Star idol of Brum fans a handful of time ago. The Ringers clocked up eleven strikes and only the inexorable march of time muffled a full peal of twelve), but there’s only so many ways you can describe an imaginary match.

But this really isn’t a football story. There are far more interesting things going on in the margins of the narrative, or perhaps along the touchlines. The narrator, Joe Gidner, having “had this trouble and left theological college”, lives in the village schoolmaster’s house, combining the writing of greetings-card verses and looking after his host’s invalid wife. He is also the club’s secretary, and is chosen to write the first draft of the history of the club’s victory, which this novel purports to be. He is an engaging almost whimsical narrator, and proves a helpful guide to the club’s adventures, the players’ and others’ back-stories, and the less than glamorous mid-1970’s setting in which football supporters’ violence is taken for granted.

Steeple Sinderby itself is a stereotypical English village, with all the charm but also all the flaws. Gidner tells us about its inhabitants, its entry in Pevsner’s Buildings of England and its one notable previous inhabitant, the peasant poet Thomas Dadds. The club’s chairman, Mr Fangfoss, is not interested in football but assumes the role because he is used to running everything. He is a bigot but sympathetically portrayed nonetheless, including his unorthodox marital arrangements.

Despite the team’s inevitable victory in the final, the novel ends in a downbeat manner.

“I often wish I could have known the end at the beginning, so that each detail could have been savored as it happened. But then, life isn’t a gramophone record one can play again and again […] It is Now or Never for most of us, and we haven’t the time.”

Everyone leaves either the club or the village, or both, Joe’s attempts to woo a young lady he is attracted to come to naught, and the club is wound up, in recognition that such heights will never be reached again. Joe’s story is one of missed opportunities, and the subtle whimsy of the story is overlaid with what felt like a somewhat manufactured nostalgia – the 1970’s were the present day when the book was written, village life was not really under threat, and football violence and the bigotry of Enoch Powell and the like with which it was often associated is nothing to be nostalgic about. So I was left unconvinced by this novella despite its many charms.

Standard
Book review

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens, 1970

This 1970 Booker winner opens with the following quote:

“If patients are disturbed, their families are often very disturbing.”

This really tells you all you need to know about this novel. The central character, Norman Zweck, is mentally ill, and his illness can be traced directly back to his profoundly dysfunctional family.

The Elected Member by Rubens, Bernice Paperback Book The Cheap Fast Free Post

Norman comes from a traditional Jewish family. His father came to London from Lithuania with just a suitcase and a name and address written on a scrap of paper. Despite being forty Norman lives at home (and indeed has never left) with the ghost of his controlling mother and his weak-willed father. His older sister, Bella, still lives at home as well and wears ankle socks every day as a vivid reminder of her frozen adolescence. Younger sister Laura left home and married outside their religion, and has therefore been expelled from the family circle – mention of her name is forbidden.

The primary symptom of Norman’s mental illness is that he sees silverfish crawling everywhere. It’s a horribly and vividly realised psychosis, and it cripples him, leaving him unable to leave his bedroom, work, or sustain a relationship.

We slowly learn the details of the family history through the reminiscences of the characters as they react to Norman’s most recent breakdown. He is addicted to amphetamines, although the precise cocktail of drugs and childhood trauma that leads to his illness is not ever entirely resolved. However his family are unable to cope, so on the advice of the family doctor they have him committed to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Here he quickly finds someone ready to sell him more amphetamines, meaning any treatment is unlikely to work. Back home his family suffers feelings of guilt that they have not been able to help him. Bella, we eventually find out, had an incestuous relationship with her brother. Laura ran away from a relationship with Norman’s best friend, David, who we are given to understand (without it ever being made explicit) was his lover. Thoughts of and actual suicides haunt the novel, giving it a structure in which we come to see that the mental institution Norman is committed to is very similar to the home he was unable to leave.

The novel’s title is puzzling. One of Norman’s fellow inmates in the hospital has delusions he is in the Cabinet, although he is always referred to as Minister rather than the elected member, or any variation thereof, and in any event is a relatively peripheral character upon which to name the novel. The title could refer to Norman being the chosen one, the golden boy on whom the hopes of his family came to rest – he was gifted with languages, and qualified as a barrister – although the ‘member’ element of the title still escapes me.

Bernice Rubens had a long writing career, and most of her many novels remain in print, so there must be an audience for them somewhere. But whilst I found The Elected Member a largely inoffensive read, it left me with no appetite for following up with anything else by this author.

Standard
Book review

Don’t Believe a Word, by David Shariatmadari, 2019

Don’t Believe a Word is subtitled “From Myths to Misunderstandings – How Language Really Works” which is a pretty bold claim, and one I suspect Shariatmadari would probably disavow. Because this is much more a summary of the current state of research into some of the larger issues around language acquisition and use than anything approaching a comprehensive final set of answers to some of the difficult questions about this issue.

Because language is profoundly mysterious. How we as a species came to uniquely acquire the power of language is endlessly fascinating, and I was hoping for something that attempted to described the processes whereby we went from the simple sounds required to warn of predators or communicate during a hunt to the infinitely more complex process I am using to write these sentences, however inelegantly. Unfortunately the author really only skims these issues for the safer, more familiar ground of why language is not ‘going to the dogs’ or the differences between languages, dialects and ideolects.

The structure for the book is that each chapter is intended to expose a common myth about language. Demonstrating that standards of English are not declining, and never have, is done easily enough, by quoting the same complaint made across the centuries. Older people will always feel alienated from the language of the young who are much more innovative in their use of language, and will use their positions of authority that come with age to define standard English and try to shame younger people into conformity. Which means I can look forward to hopefully one day hearing the incessant use of the word ‘like’ as a meaningless filler to become the ‘correct’ way of expressing oneself, and youngsters chastised for not using it appropriately.

Each generation will think of itself as exceptional, and find reasons why the language they are using is different from that of their predecessors. Much of this is down to the rapid spread of technology which introduces words and ideas simply not required before. I am grateful to the author for bringing to my attention this brilliant summary of the issue from the wonderful Douglas Adams (from The Salmon of Doubt):

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Another ‘myth’ Shariatmadari addresses is the idea that foreign languages have untranslatable words. Is that really a language myth that needs to be challenged, or just a bit of fun on the internet that no-one takes particularly seriously? Yes it makes other cultures sound sound quaint or bizarre. and can contribute to the ‘othering’ of foreigners. But other cultures are often profoundly different from our own (not better or worse, just different) so it would be surprising if they didn’t have words for things we use phrases or sentences to describe.

There’s a thoughtful discussion of whether our languages shape how we think, rather than the other way round. Those of us exposed to George Orwell’s thesis (in 1984) that we need a language of nuance and expression to articulate concepts such as democracy will be open to the idea that we need words to explain ideas before those ideas can exist. But mentioning Orwell brings me to a minor quibble with this book. In the chapter on whether language is deteriorating, the author cites Orwell as “clearly wrong when he imagined that language would become decadent and ‘share in the general collapse’ of civilisation unless hard work was done to repair it.” The text Shariatmadari is quoting here is not cited, but the internet being the wonderful thing it is I easily found it in Politics and the English Language. Now you won’t find a better. more powerfully argued essay in favour of clear writing in politics that this. Shariatmadari unfairly dismisses it because Orwell opens with the deliberately contentious argument that:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.

Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

To break one of Orwell’s prime rules (‘never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print’) this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. All Orwell is arguing is that bad writing about politics is often bad for specific reasons: “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Which is surely a more important point than the one he is being discredited with?

Later, Shariatmadari gives a respectful, if sceptical account of Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar theory. The idea that humans are born with an innate language ability far in advance of any other skill or ability in life (compare the struggles we have to walk or feed ourselves) has yet to be proven beyond all doubt, but the alternative, that language is “a medium that is formed as it is used … a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it” seems inadequate when contrasted with the other clumsy abilities we develop as children. If you want a primer on Universal Grammar and the current research on the theory this is not a bad place to start.

Overall this is an entertaining, accessible and well-evidenced summary of the state of linguistics as it is currently understood. As with the book I recently read on genetics, I left this with the impression that there is still a lot of research to be done on this subject, and that our understanding of ‘how language really works’ is as elusive as ever.

Standard
Book review

In a German Pension, by Katherine Mansfield, 1911

In a German Pension joins that small subset of books that the author didn’t want to see republished. It was Katherine Mansfield’s first published collection, although most of the stories had been previously published in various magazines. Because of the war and problems with the publisher (it went into liquidation) the book was quickly forgotten, and when the idea of republishing it was later floated by her then husband, John Middleton Murry, Mansfield refused. She considered the stories juvenalia and feared, I am sure rightly, that they would contribute to post-war anti-German sentiment.

In a German Pension: 13 Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Have the stories weathered the passage of the following century, or should Mansfield’s wishes have been respected? I would strongly argue the former – the tone of the collection might be uneven, and some of the portraits are caricatures, but overall this is a powerful group of stories in which the focus is not so much the German residents of the pension (a boarding house) with which the earlier stories are concerned, but the role of women in German and European society in the later stories which emerges as a more dominant theme.

The stories were written after her stay in a German spa before the first world war broke out. Mansfield was there to recuperate after a miscarriage. The collection is formed of thirteen stories, some only a few pages long, with the whole collection barely a hundred pages in total. The early stories are slightly whimsical observations of the characters in the pension, observed by a narrator who captures the chatter of the residents with the minimum of commentary. The Germans are boorish and judgmental towards the English narrator, although already the themes of maternity and women’s role in society are beginning to emerge:

“Is it true,” asked the Widow, picking her teeth with a hairpin as she spoke, “that you are a vegetarian?”

“Why, yes; I have not eaten meat for three years.”

“Im—possible! Have you any family?”

“No.”

“There now, you see, that’s what you’re coming to! Who ever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible. But you never have large families in England now; I suppose you are too busy with your suffragetting. Now I have had nine children, and they are all alive, thank God. Fine, healthy babies—though after the first one was born I had to—”

“How wonderful!” I cried.

“Wonderful,” said the Widow contemptuously, replacing the hairpin in the knob which was balanced on the top of her head. “Not at all! A friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a supper-party and had them placed on the table. Of course she was very proud.”

This is carefully nuanced writing. What is not said is as important as what is, and the reader is able to gain a picture of the narrator’s situation without it ever being made explicit. After a few more short stories in which German attitudes to class are lightly mocked, the collection takes a more serious turn. Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding is a chilling portrait of an abusive marriage. Herr Brechenmacher is a bully who orders his wife around. She has five children under the age of nine, but is looking forward to a night off attending a wedding celebration. This is how the author closes the story:

“They walked home in silence. Herr Brechenmacher strode ahead, she stumbled after him. White and forsaken lay the road from the railway station to their house—a cold rush of wind blew her hood from her face, and suddenly she remembered how they had come home together the first night. Now they had five babies and twice as much money; but—

“Na, what is it all for?” she muttered, and not until she had reached home, and prepared a little supper of meat and bread for her man did she stop asking herself that silly question.

Herr Brechenmacher broke the bread into his plate, smeared it round with his fork and chewed greedily.

“Good?” she asked, leaning her arms on the table and pillowing her breast against them.

“But fine!”

He took a piece of the crumb, wiped it round his plate edge, and held it up to her mouth. She shook her head.

“Not hungry,” she said.

“But it is one of the best pieces, and full of the fat.”

He cleared the plate; then pulled off his boots and flung them into a corner.

“Not much of a wedding,” he said, stretching out his feet and wriggling his toes in the worsted socks.

“N—no,” she replied, taking up the discarded boots and placing them on the oven to dry.

Herr Brechenmacher yawned and stretched himself, and then looked up at her, grinning.

“Remember the night that we came home? You were an innocent one, you were.”

“Get along! Such a time ago I forget.” Well she remembered.

“Such a clout on the ear as you gave me…. But I soon taught you.”

“Oh, don’t start talking. You’ve too much beer. Come to bed.”

He tilted back in his chair, chuckling with laughter.

“That’s not what you said to me that night. God, the trouble you gave me!”

But the little Frau seized the candle and went into the next room. The children were all soundly sleeping. She stripped the mattress off the baby’s bed to see if he was still dry, then began unfastening her blouse and skirt.

“Always the same,” she said—“all over the world the same; but, God in heaven—but stupid.”

Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.”

That last line is like a punch in the face – “She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt”. The narrative is now much darker. Women are cursed with eternal pregnancies which are dangerous and potentially fatal (“my insides are all twisted up with having children too quickly” on character observes) and children are a burden not a joy. The stories are often told from the perspective of servants who are also oppressed, a situation which finds its apotheosis in The Child Who Was Tired, in which an exhausted child is expected to be the principal carer for her younger siblings, and finds the burden too much:

“I don’t believe Holy Mary could keep him quiet,” she murmured. “Did Jesus cry like this when He was little? If I was not so tired perhaps I could do it; but the baby just knows that I want to go to sleep. And there is going to be another one.”

She flung the baby on the bed, and stood looking at him with terror.

From the next room there came the jingle of glasses and the warm sound of laughter.

And she suddenly had a beautiful marvellous idea.

She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands.

“Ts—ts—ts!” she said, “lie there, silly one; you will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby.”

He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the Child-Who-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her.

“One moment—he is almost asleep,” she cried.

And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the Frau’s bed and covered the baby’s face with it, pressed with all her might as he struggled, “like a duck with its head off, wriggling”, she thought.

She heaved a long sigh, then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all—nobody at all.”

Powerful, distressing stuff. Mansfield may have wanted to forget this collection when she moved on to later work, but I am glad these stories remain in print. The anti-German sentiment has faded and we can now see these stories as a very personal and rather touching narrative.

The collection can be read online for free here.

Standard
Book review

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, 1891

I am not sure why my feelings towards the novels of Thomas Hardy are so ambivalent. It could be the fairly turgid poetry I was force-fed at school, dating from the period of his life when he gave up writing novels (apparently because of the hostile popular reaction to Tess and 1895’s Jude the Obscure). It could also be because Hardy is so often the “go-to” writer for film and television adaptations, so I have a pretty good understanding of what happens in his novels, meaning that they can feel over-familiar.

Despite these reservations I am slowly coming round to the uncontroversial view that Hardy is a wonderful writer. I have many more of his novels to read, but thus far Tess is to my mind his most successful novel – in fact one of the best Victorian novels ever written, up there with Dickens at his finest.

Set in rural Wessex at the end of the nineteenth century, as technology slowly transforms country life, Tess is the tragic tale of a young country woman who has the misfortune to have an ancient family name, Durbeyfield. Her parents believe this to be a corruption of “d’Urberville”, the surname of a noble Norman family. This seemingly unimportant discovery is the spark for Tess’s tragedy .

We first see her at a village May Dance, a traditional ritual to welcome the spring. The dance is joined by Angel Clare, on a walking tour with his brothers – he notices Tess but doesn’t speak to her and the incident is soon forgotten. Meanwhile, Tess’s parents hatch a plan to recover their family fortunes. They send her to visit Mrs D’Urberville, a rich widow in the nearby town of Trantridge, to “claim kin”. There Tess meets Mrs D’Urberville’s son Alec, who persuades his mother to offer her a job as a poultry keeper. Alec’s interest in Tess is apparent. Her parents are well aware they are exposing the young and vulnerable Tess to risk in sending her to work at Trantridge, but they openly encourage the idea that Alec might marry her.

Late one night, walking home from town Alec offers Tess a ride home. They reach a grove in a forest where he drugs and rapes her. The attack is only implied, but there’s very little ambiguity in terms of what happens. What happens immediately after the attack is less clear. The narrator fast forwards several months to a new section of the text, entitled “Maid no More”. Tess is returning home, pregnant, angry and ashamed. This is a novel of silences and ambiguity, not least here. Was Tess living with Alec as his lover, perhaps with a promise of marriage? The text gives only hints and we are left to fill most of the gaps . Tess’s mother Joan hints she was aware all was not well: “After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here” (81) and Tess is even more ambiguous, telling Alec “I made up my mind (to leave) as soon as I saw – what I ought to have seen sooner” – presumably that Alec had no serious intention of marrying her.

Tess has a complex publication history – it first appeared in serial publication in a magazine, and the publisher required Hardy to make a number of changes to the text to make it more palatable to late-Victorian mores. This gave Hardy the opportunity to test public reaction and make changes when the text appeared in novel form a couple of years later. The chapters in which Tess is “seduced” (as it might have been seen at the time) or more rightly attacked, were fine-tuned by the author to leave sufficient ambiguity as to the precise relationship – and degree of immorality – between Tess and Alec. Hardy wants us to be on Tess’s ‘side’. He portrays her as a victim of male depravity and the judgmental social attitudes of the time. The novel’s defiant sub-title “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” emphasises Hardy’s close identification with his heroine.

Once she has left Trantridge, Tess gives birth to a sickly infant son, who only lives a few weeks. Just before he dies she baptises him herself with the name Sorrow, and then buries him in a “shabby corner” of the churchyard reserved for unbaptised infants under a homemade cross. These are some of the most heart-breaking moments of the novel, but more is to come.

Two years pass, and a wiser, sadder Tess finds a job as a milkmaid at a dairy, far enough away from her home village so her reputation as a ‘fallen woman’ can be left behind. There she meets Angel Clare again, now an apprentice farmer learning dairy management. Angel has rejected his father’s suggestion that, like his two brothers, he becomes a clergyman, although their theological differences seem obscure. In this bucolic paradise, Angel and Tess fall in love. At one point they wander into a wild party of the farm’s garden, a nascent Eden, and the author makes the comparison explicit:

“The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years”…”This spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light, which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve”.

122-130

For a while they enjoy an innocent courtship, but Angel’s proposal of marriage puts Tess in a difficult situation – would he still want to marry her if he knew of her former ‘relationship’ with Alec? Tess chooses the worst possible option – she tells him after they marry. Unable to overcome the Victorian concept that brides must be virgins (“maids”) , Angel is appalled, and rejects Tess, although seems unable to decide what to do next. In a doom-laden scene he carries Tess while sleep-walking (sleep carrying?) to a nearby church, and places her in a tomb. Foreshadowing anyone? To bring an end to the torture of indecision Tess suggests they separate, saying she will return to her parents. Rather melodramatically Angel leaves the country and goes to Brazil to seek his fortune. Things accelerate from this point. Alec reappears in Tess’s life, and further misfortune dogs her. The novel’s famous ending scene finally comes almost as a relief to the tortured Tess.

This is a rich, rewardingly complex novel. It is awash with symbolism and foreshadowing. As early as page 35 we are told that Tess’s “face was dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess”. The novel is suffused with religious references, as well as a multitude of direct and indirect quotes from nineteenth century and earlier poets, and of course Shakespeare. The novel opens with an epigram from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and thereafter includes mentions from Much Ado, Lear, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, As You Like It, The Rape of Lucrece, and of course, Romeo and Juliet, to mention the few I spotted (one of which, “He suited the action to the word” (page 62), a reference to Hamlet, Act 3 scene 2, was not spotted by the otherwise exhaustively detailed footnotes provided in the Penguin Classic edition!)

While some critics have found the male leads in the novel to be two-dimensional, Tess is in many ways a modern heroine. She is strong-willed and does more than anyone could ever humanly expect to avoid her fate. If she makes mistakes it is hardly surprising given the lack of role models and support she has in her life. When there is finally no escape she takes matters into her own hands – even the pious Angel seems to accept without judgement her decision to end her relationship with Alec in the way she does.

Standard
Book review

Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood, 1972

Surfacing, Atwood’s second novel, is an elusive narrative. Ostensibly it is a simple story – after a long absence an unnamed narrator returns to her childhood home in the remote Canadian countryside to try and find her missing father. Her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David, complete the group. The homecoming is uneasy – despite being familiar the setting feels alien and disturbing. On arrival at the family home there is no obvious sign of her father. The group agrees to stay for a week and turn the visit into a short, back to nature holiday. Tensions between each couple slowly emerge – David belittles Anna, who tells the narrator that he is a philanderer who objectifies women – for example he insists that she always wears makeup. The narrators relationship with Joe is equally strained.

Time is whiled away in fairly banal tasks – they go blueberry-picking, fishing and swimming, weed the vegetable patch and play board games. The women do the bulk of the domestic tasks. The narrator’s mental state slowly deteriorates and the narrative begins to fragmented. Sentences become short and disjointed, and eventually incoherent. The narrator is haunted by memories of her marriage, her child, and the abortion she was pushed into having. Her increasing sense of paranoia is fuelled by David’s constant references to an impending American invasion of Canada, which she treats entirely seriously. She sees hidden messages from her parents in every day objects around the house, and cannot decide if he is really alive or dead. Meanwhile David and Joe are making a modernist film, Random Samples, which is really just a collage of miscellaneous scenes. This again emphasises the narrator’s sense of alienation, making her feel like a performer rather than a real person with her own identity.

The novel draws to a climax when both men attempt unsuccessfully to pressurise the narrator into having sex with them – when rebuffed they sulk. This may have been the final trigger for the narrator’s descent into a full blown psychotic episode. She destroys David’s film and escapes in a canoe, hiding in the forest until the others leave the island. She trashes everything in the cabin, and runs around naked, eating unwashed plants, and living outside. I found these quite disturbing scenes, and although the end of the novel suggests a return to some form of normality it was something of a relief. This will probably sound patronising, but this felt like an early sketch for a novel – lots of themes and ideas are laid out for consideration, but the narrative was erratic and very difficult to engage with. There’s little here to suggest the impressive prose and strong ideas that Atwood was to develop in her later work.

Standard
Book review

Monstrous Regiment (Discworld 31) by Sir Terry Pratchett, 2003

Did I mention that Terry Pratchett was, amongst many other things, a brave writer? In his novels he tackles some of the most difficult subjects, and the fantasy settings can only provide so much “it’s only a story about vampires and trolls” cover. In Monstrous Regiment he addresses some seriously weighty issues – war, the status of women in the military and wider society, and fundamentalist religion.

Dueling Book Clubs Review Monstrous Regiment - The Fandomentals

For much of the time he is on a tightrope, balanced finely between being preachy while also avoiding being insensitive – these are not laughing matters. Amazingly he pulls it off – there’s never a point in this novel where I felt spoken down to or where the material wasn’t treated with the respect it deserved, while all the time making a series of serious points about the issues discussed. It’s mature writing of the highest order, Pratchett at the peak of his powers.

Which begs the question – what’s the novel about? Monstrous Regiment is set in Borogravia, a deeply traditional country not far from Uberwald, and therefore a long way from anywhere else. Its people are followers of Nuggan, a weirdly strict deity who rules through his representative on earth, or in the part of it that is Borogravia, the Duchess, the country’s monarch, who is almost certainly long-dead. There is strong middle-European feel to this country, not least to its constant border disputes with its neighbours over who owes a particular field or tree.

The current war with Zlobenia is going badly for Borogravia, and we join the novel with recruiters scouring the countryside for anyone who can hold a gun. The narrator follows Polly Perks, who joins up to try and find her missing in action brother Paul. (This is not just sisterly love – if Paul cannot be traced the family pub will pass to her drunken cousin when her father dies. It is one thing to recognise the unfairness to women of inheritance law, and another to include such reference in a fantasy novel). Joining a long tradition of women in the military, Polly disguises herself as a man. Much fun is had with her attempts to adopt a male swagger, to occupy space, and to fart and belch convincingly. Other recruits sign up – Maladict, a vampire, a troll called Carborundum, an Igor, and Tonker, Shufti, Wazzer and Lofty. Without wanting to spoil the reveal, this unlikely bunch of recruits are not what you might expect of a group of young men and persons joining the army.

They set off for the front, led by Sergeant Jackrum, a corpulent and highly experienced recruiting officer and their commanding officer, Lieutenant Blouse. Their first encounter with an arrogant troupe of Zlobenian cavalry is surprisingly successful. even more so when their unlikely victory is reported on by war correspondent William de Worde, he of The Truth. They quickly become popular figures of interest followed back home, and elsewhere by Commander Vimes, sent from Ankh-Morpork to try to broker a peace and protect Ankh-Morpork interests. Vimes sees that a straightforward Zlobenian victory will lead to an imbalance of power in the area, so he wonders whether the small band of plucky recruits working their way to the war might prove more useful than just cannon fodder. Sergeant Angua keeps track of the recruits as they make their way to the front, occasionally providing help, such as an unexpected package of coffee when Maladict, a black ribboner, (a vampire who has foresworn blood) begins to suffer withdrawal symptoms. On their journey the links between the unlikely recruits grow stronger, and their various backstories and secrets slowly emerge.

When they reach the front the recruits realise that the war is at a stalemate – Borogravian troops are pinned down and unable to break out of a small area of land; Zlobenian and alliance troops holding the area’s principal fortress but are unable to press their advantage. Control of the castle is key, and in a highly risky plan (which is therefore guaranteed success) they decide to infiltrate the Keep disguised (of course) as washerwomen, free the prisoners, and end the war.

I can’t tell you much more without revealing some important plot points, and for once I don’t intend to do so. As always with Pratchett the plot is really secondary to the character development anyway, and the outcome is not really that much of a surprise.

This is one of my favourite later Discworld novels – it’s set in largely new territory with only a brief appearance of regular characters, but remains unquestionably Discworld in feel throughout. The sensitivity with which the material and issues are handled is impressive, and although the jokes as always are pretty basic, the central characters are fully rounded and utterly believable. There are no bad starting places in the series, but if you have preconceptions about fantasy novels as being full of dwarves and dragons, there are worse places to put you straight than this.

P.S. I am sure you will have spotted it, but just in case, the title is an ironic reference to this 16th century misogynist pamphlet against women in positions of authority.

P.P.S. Towards the end of the novel, Pratchett uses the haunting refrain “the world turned upside down” several times. You might recognise this phrase from the musical ‘Hamilton‘. But Wikipedia tells me that the phrase derives from a pamphlet published in the 1640s “as a protest against the policies of Parliament relating to the celebration of Christmas” and has an even earlier origin in Scripture:

“These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also; Whom Jason hath received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus‘.” Acts 17:5-7

The Hamilton reference derives from a legend that the British army marched to this tune when they surrendered after the Siege of Yorktown. The British army would apparently have played an American or French tune in tribute to the victors, but General Washington refused them the honours of war and insisted that they play “a British or German march.” Like most good stories of this kind it is probably apocryphal – it first appears in the historical record a century after the surrender!

Standard