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Book review

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, 1987

Penelope Lively won the 1987 Booker Prize for this interesting, eminently readable but ultimately unsatisfying novel. It tells the story of Claudia Hampton, a 76-year-old historian. As Claudia lays dying in hospital she narrates the story of her life in an internal monologue. The narrative is complex, with the point of view changing constantly, and with time and place jumping across the decades and across the continents.

The novel’s title is romantic and mysterious, but the explanation when it comes – a moon tiger is a rather absurd name for an anti-mosquito candle (see picture) which burns slowly through the night – is disappointingly prosaic, involving neither moons nor tigers. The moon tiger is co-opted as a rather heavy handed symbol for the human experience – we all glow brightly and then end up as ashes – but I was still disappointed that something so romantic-sounding could be such an everyday utilitarian object.

Lively creates some vivid characters in this narrative. Claudia’s brother Gordon is for a while her incestuous lover – this is their closely-held for the rest of their lives, but is not portrayed as a damaging or harmful experience.  At the outbreak of the second world war Claudia becomes a war correspondent (as one does) and travels to Cairo, where she meets and begins an intense relationship with Tom Southern, captain of an English armoured tank division. This, we know from the comments of contemporary Claudia looking back on their time together, (although it is narrated in real time) is a doomed war-time affair, and inevitably Tom is killed at El Alamein. 

After the war Claudia meets Jasper, an artistic aristocrat with whom she goes on to have a long-term but sporadic relationship from which she has her only child, Lisa. Lisa is not the free spirit her mother considers herself to be, and their relationship is strained. Later a gay Hungarian student, Lazlo, has a walk-on part in the narrative, although one has the impression that all of life’s events for Claudia after the loss of Tom are an afterthought. This is reinforced by the novel’s finale, when Claudia is sent Tom’s wartime diary which re-emphasises the intensity of his feelings for her. Regret for what might have been her life had he survived is one of her last thoughts before the novel closes.

Despite its innovative structure, this is a very traditional novel. It is a romance, albeit an exceptionally well-written one. There’s nothing wrong with that – Pride and Prejudice is a romance, and it is one of the best novels of all time. But has Moon Tiger got anything interesting to say about human relationships? I’m not sure. Do the characters come alive at all; do they ever go beyond being characters in a novel about whom one never really cares? At one point Claudia reminisces about Lazlo going for a walk in London, and bringing home a nice bunch of flowers, which, it later transpires, he unwittingly picked from a public park. At a dinner party this might be a short, not particularly funny about how foreigners don’t understand English social conventions. But here it is an awkward anecdote, intended to illustrate  Lazlo’s naivety, but never escaping the sense that it is a made-up story intended to play a role in a narrative, rather than something that genuinely happened to someone.

The death-bed format plays a factor here, depriving the narrative of any true surprises. It is probably my failure to engage with the text fully that stopped me caring about Gordon, Lazlo, or Jasper – they felt like background characters in the play of Claudia’s life – and it was only really Claudia and Tom, in the vivid chapters telling the story of their brief moments together, where the story truly felt real. It’s worth reading for that story alone.

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Book review

A Brief History of Everyone who ever lived, by Alex Rutherford, 2016

Genetics is science still in its infancy. The structure of DNA was only identified in the 1950’s, and the human genome was mapped in 2003. Compare that to the study of physics or chemistry where the key building blocks of our understanding have been in place much longer. A lot of what we thought we knew about genetics ten years ago now is considered out of date and inaccurate; what we think in 20 years of what we think we know now, who can say? As such this is more a progress report on genetics in 2016 than a definitive survey of the science, comprehensive though it is.

I have always been fascinated by the puzzle that we all have increasing numbers of great grand parents as you go back each generation, but that the total human population in much higher now than it has ever been. Rutherford calculates that it you go back to the eighth century we will each have required 137,438,953,472 people in our family tree. I make that about 33 generations, but of course many times more than the number of people who have ever lived. It follows that family trees are a misleading presentation of our genealogy. There must be many points across our family history were the lines cross and blend. “What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more mesh or web-like”. Rutherford expresses this point by looking at the genealogy of some of the Royal families of Europe. Charles 2nd of Spain should have had 62 ancestors in his preceding six generations, (2 parents + 4 grandparents + 8 great grand parents and so on). In fact he had only 32 – many of his great aunts were also his great grandmothers, for example. Go back another two generations and instead of over 250 ancestors he had 82. This is obviously an extreme example caused by the shallow gene pool from which the royal families chose their partners, but go back far enough and the same pattern would be seen in all our families.

The other riddle that Rutherford answers definitively here is whether, as is often suggested, we are all eventually related to Attila the Hun. The short answer is if you go back around ten centuries or so then we all share some genetic material from everyone who lived at that point. This is obviously highly counter-intuitive, but Rutherford demonstrates it with precision and statistics. I would struggle to repeat the analysis for myself – it’s complicated – but I take some comfort from knowing where to find it if I need it!

This is an eclectic look at the state of genetics today, including issues as diverse as why the distribution of wet and dry ear wax in humans suggests that the people of South Korea might be the least smelly on earth; why the idea of a Danish Viking conquest of the British Isles involving rape and pillage is not borne out by a genetic legacy; and why monoamine oxidase A, the so-called “warrior gene”, ought not to be a valid defence in criminal trials. Rutherford charts our progression as a species from out of Africa, using evidence provided by ancient DNA. A toe bone of a Neanderthal who died 50,000 years ago in the Siberian reveals our ancestors appetite to mate with other humanoids now extinct, explaining why we all have a little caveman DNA in our genome.

Genetics is complex, and there were pages in the book were my non-scientific eyes glazed over, there’s no point in denying otherwise, however accessible this book was intended to be. The analysis of whether race is a genetic characteristic, or whether it actually exists or not, was a case in point. I think Rutherford concludes that it both does and does not, but I would need to check. The relationship of disease to genetic is equally complex. You start out by looking at the more obvious inherited illnesses such as Tay-Sachs disease or sickle cell anemia, and think yep, that makes sense. But once you start looking at more complex conditions and characteristics, even those most obviously inherited such as height, tracing the precise role our genes play in this process has proven elusive. Or that was what I understood Rutherford to be saying anyway!

I know a little more about genetics than I knew last week, which has got to be a good thing. But I must admit I will return to the comfort of fiction in the coming days with a small sense of relief.

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Book review

A Walk-on Part, Diaries 1995-1999 by Chris Mullin, 2011

Chris Mullin, MP for Sunderland South for 23 years, had a lot more than a walk-on part (a minor role, a metaphor drawn from the theatre) in the New Labour years. These can be dated from the death of John Smith in 1994, and the ascendancy of Tony Blair from that date, which is where this, his third volume of diaries, starts.

Mullin first entered Parliament in 1987, and at the time was widely perceived as a Bennite, that is to say on the hard left of the party. This was a misconception that slowly changed and he would now more typically attract the label “soft-left”, generally supporting the Labour Government but occasionally rebelling on points of principle. His description of himself as having a walk-on part in the political affairs of these years is undermined by the fact that he was appointed (admittedly to the lowest rung of Government) as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment, Transport, and the Regions in July 1999, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Department for International Development in 2001, and lastly in June 2003, as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. In addition he chaired the Home Office Select Committee for several years, all of which gave him a ring-side seat for the roller-coaster ride that was New Labour.

Mullin identifies very early on the “fault lines which would come to haunt New Labour in the years ahead – control freakery, a soft spot for rich men, the obsession with spin”. Although astute he is probably being too kind here on New Labour – there was more than a soft spot for rich men for example. He deflects a lot of his concern about the political direction of New Labour on to Peter Mandelson, for whom he has a particular aversion. Like many others in the party at the time Mullin was charmed by Blair and time after time gives him the benefit of the doubt on the basis of his personal persuasion.

Another early entry in January 1997 records Blair addressing the Parliamentary party:

“On top form. Passionate, witty, positive…We had plenty to offer…He listed commitments – work, education or training for 250,000 young people; an end to the internal market in the NHS; reduced class sizes; and end to nursery vouchers; an extension of protection in the workplace; we will sign up to the EU Social Chapter; the right to join and be represented by a union; a minimum wage; a Freedom of Information Act; the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into law.”

This is a useful summary of the relatively modest aspirations of new Labour in opposition. By my count most if not all of those commitments were met, and more, even if there were some major compromises along the way. The events of these years are sufficiently fresh in my memory, and the editing is sufficiently ruthless to make the pages zip past quite quickly. One minor point of interest is to spot early appearance of characters who were to go on and play a much larger role in politics in years to come appear briefly – he meets David Cameron for example, a smooth-skinned self confident advisor to Michael Green at Carlton Communications.

Mullin is relatively astute, but he doesn’t always accurately foresee what way the wind is blowing. Some of the clumsier judgments were no doubt edited out, but his editor Ruth Winstone, who also edited Tony Benn’s diaries, left in his comment “We are going to lose. Blair knows it too, I can see it in his eyes” written just two weeks before Labour’s landslide in 1997.

The control-freakery that Mullin diagnoses is evident throughout these years, not least in the ruthless control of candidate selection. A good example appears on late April 1997 with the last minute parachuting-in of a candidate in Dudley where the incumbent was persuaded to take a job in the House of Lords (p271). The machismo atmosphere of New Labour is also apparent. Early on in the first Blair administration a decision was made to restrict single parent benefits. It is interesting to look back on how single parents were demonised at the time and regularly identified as a particular source of society’s ills – now they are almost forgotten as a group. Blair forced through this cut even though there was no evidence it would deliver any savings and possibly ended up keeping this group on benefits longer. Mullin resignedly notes “It is no longer a question of resources, but of virility”. (282). The absence of Cabinet Government is another criticism of Blairism that is fully evidenced here – “Tony has practically abandoned cabinet government. All key decisions are taken by the small cabal around his – Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson, and (sometimes) Gordon Brown.” (282/3)

Mullin regularly agonises about the pointlessness of his role as a backbench MP. Factories are closed down in his constituency and all he can do is lobby Government for support. Constituents come to him with intractable personal and social problems – anti-social behaviour and the welfare culture of his area stand out in particular – which he can do little about. The war in Kosovo kicks off and all he can do is vote in favour of the NATO bombing campaign which sparks a refugee crisis. His personal crusades against Freemasonry in public office (especially the police and the judiciary) and for scrutiny of the work of the Security Services are both kicked into the long grass and effectively abandoned by the time he is elevated into junior office.

This is a fascinating inside look at the early Blair years from someone who was very close to the action. It confirms the popular consensus judgment on New Labour, but is no less valuable for that.

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Book review

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman, 2005

Anansi Boys tells the story of Charles “Fat Charlie” Nancy. Fat Charlie is an accountant, engaged half-heartedly to Rosie, whose monstrous mother is set on disrupting their engagement. Their wedding preparations are put on hold when Charlie has to travel to the Caribbean to attend his father’s funeral. There Charlie learns that not only was his father an incarnation of the West African spider god, Anansi, but also that he has a brother, and that he can be contacted by asking a spider.

Charlie takes this news relatively well, considering, and returns to his humdrum life in London. Inevitably he can’t resist summoning up his brother, Spider. Spider is everything Charlie is not – confident, charismatic, persuasive. He sets up home in Charlie’s flat, and begins to take over this life, with, as they say, disastrous consequences, losing him both his job and his fiancee.

The supernatural is invoked powerfully in Gaiman’s previous novel, American Gods, because it is taken seriously; here the whimsicality undermines the impact of the narrative. There’s never any genuine threat from the gods who resent Anansi’s status, or from the more earth-bound Grahame Coats, Charlie’s sleazy boss, who has been embezzling his clients for years. Most readers will realise very early on that Charlie is going to end up with the petite officer investigating his case, Daisy, that Charlie and Spider and going to be reconciled, and that Mr Coats is not going to get away with his crimes. This lack of threat, even from the personification of the malevolent tiger god, led to one reviewer describing the novel as “whimsical supernaturalism” which feels about right. The New Your Times review of the novel used a similar phrase, talking of “an Uncle Remus folksiness to the stories that sends the airy blitheness of the farce plummeting down to earth”.  

The other aspect of the novel that I found a little disappointing was the humour. Whimsy is always a tough one to pull off, and stripped of its context just about any joke can fall flat, but the jokes in the novel are consistently weak. Here’s some examples:

Spider: Things came up.
Fat Charlie: What kind of things?
Spider: Things. They came up. That’s what things do. They come up. I can’t be expected to keep track of them all.

More dialogue between Charlie and Spider:

“The ties of blood,” said Spider, “are stronger than water.”
“Water’s not strong,” objected Fat Charlie.
“Stronger than vodka, then. Or volcanoes. Or, or ammonia.”

This isn’t repartee. Ammonia’s not a comedic example of something unexpectedly strong is it?

The narration aims for Pratchett or Adams, but consistently misses.

“It was England in the autumn; the sun was, by definition, something that only happened when it wasn’t cloudy or raining.”

Does this mean anything? Does it say anything about the English weather, or is it just repeating a very tired cliche? Compare how Adams turns that idea completely inside out with the cursed rain god/lorry driver in (I think) Mostly Harmless. 

“There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others.”

“Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman…”

Not all the jokes fall flat. Rosie’s mother is a fine portrait of a prospective mother-in-law who could put anyone off the institution of marriage. Here she is allocating guests to tables at the wedding reception, applying the fine judgments of status that matter so much on these occasions:

“I’ll put her down for table H,” said Rosie’s mother. “She’ll be more comfortable there.” She said it in the same way most people would say things like, “Do you wish to die quickly, or shall I let Mongo have his fun first?”

Later there is this fine description of an outraged dragon:

The beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.

But these are isolated exceptions of otherwise disappointingly flat

This novel is really aimed at the young adult market. Adults will find it mildly engaging if a bit superficial, but younger readers will be gripped by the story and their hope that it all works out well for Charlie and his family. 

One final quibble – “nancy boy” in idiomatic English is a homosexual slur – was it really necessary to use this phrase in the book’s title?

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Book review

The Russian Girl, by Kingsley Amis, 1992

366437._UY630_SR1200,630_This is late Amis: The Russian Girl was published in 1992, just three years before his death. Amis is one of those novelists who essentially wrote the same novel over and over again, with slight changes of character and the setting thinly disguised. But this novel was an exception to that rule – instead of the older cast of characters bickering, having tired affairs and drinking themselves to death, The Russian Girl’s central character, Dr Richard Vaisey, is in his forties, and vaguely behaves like it. His inevitable love interest, Anna Danilova, the titular Russian girl, is in her twenties. An older academic having an affair with an exotic Russian girl (note girl, not woman; Amis was never going be that up to date) – what an original plot? But the scenario isn’t what redeems this novel.  Continue reading →

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Book review

Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh, 1942

I re-read Scoop, Black Mischief, and Vile Bodies almost annually, yet somehow I had never got round to reading Waugh’s Put Out More Flags, which features many of the characters established in these earlier novels and could be seen as a sequel. Why that is I have no idea, but I have now rectified the omission.

Image result for Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh, 1942

Waugh’s sixth novel was written and published in 1942 and as we shall see that date is significant. The plot looks back at the first year of the war and contemplates the strange period in which at first little changed for many people followed quickly by the major upheavals thereafter.

Waugh’s characters are as usual wealthy and upper-class, and the war impacts them in (for them) unexpected ways. Country estates lose their servants. Billeting officers have to find accommodation for evacuees. Basil Seal, the louche ne-er do well of earlier novels struggles to find an army commission or any other constructive role in the war. Ambrose Silk, a gay Jewish intellectual looks elsewhere for a role, ideally in the Ministry of Information. Peter Pastmaster, about to go abroad into combat, decides to marry and father an heir in case he is killed in action.

In my eyes, the novel is less than the sum of its parts. There are admittedly some fascinating character portraits. Ambrose Silk for example is an openly gay character who Waugh treats surprisingly sympathetically. In previous novels he would have been an object of ridicule, but here he is treated as the unhappy victim of his sexual desires:

A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised – these had been his; and now they were the current exchange of comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he frequent without fear of ridicule, and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself.

While Waugh may be tolerant of Silk’s sexuality, society is not. He writes a novel about a former lover, a Brownshirt who is now in a Nazi extermination camp. Basil spitefully engineers a situation where this work is interpreted as pro-German and Silk is forced to flee to Ireland, disguised as a priest. Waugh’s writing directly about a gay character without hiding behind euphemism or suggestion was quite transgressive for its time, showing a progression in his treatment of character.

Put Out More Flags captures a very precise moment in time, starting with the weeks before the war (“days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of “peace”) followed by the phoney war in which nothing seems to change very much, (“Well, we’re at war now. I expect there’ll be a lot to put up with”) and the final grim realisation that the war is starting in earnest, people are dying, and there’s no going back: “There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.”

Waugh’s commentary on these phases of the war is, as you would expect, scathing. His characters speculate that the decadence of the 20’s and 30’s, portrayed in his earlier novels and exemplified by his characters, are what lead Germany to believe we would not put up much resistance:

“You can’t blame Ribbentrop for thinking us decadent when he saw people like Basil about. I don’t suppose they’ll have much use for him in the Army.”

The comic elements of the novel are the outstanding chapters, for example when Basil abuses his sister’s position as local billeting officer, finding homes for evacuee children sent to the country to escape the air raids. He uses three horrible working class children to extort money from country folk who pay him to rehouse them. Incidentally there’s a disturbing hint of incest in these scenes. Doris, precocious oldest sister of the profitable evacuees, notices the incipient attraction between Basil and his sister Barbara:

“He’s your boy, isn’t he?” she said, turning to Barbara.

“He’s my brother, Doris”

“Ah” she said, her pig eyes dark with the wisdom of the slums, “but you fancy him don’t you? I saw”.

Waugh makes no attempt to disguise his class hatred – Doris has ‘pig’ eyes, not ‘pig-like’ eyes. He suggests that her ‘wisdom of the slums’ gives her an insight into the attraction between siblings that has previously always been hinted at but never openly acknowledged. Waugh never returns to this topic, but even to open this door the smallest of cracks must have been shocking to contemporary readers.

Put Out More Flags is in many ways just a series of sketches with the barest of plots. I think it is best seen as a portrait of the period, and as a transition novel between the lightly comic, absurbist novels of the pre-war period and the later, more serious Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy.

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Book review

The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K Dick, 1962

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history novel. Although the author Philip K. Dick is best known as a writer of science fiction, and despite the setting, the novel isDick 2 realistic in tone, and contains very few sci-fi elements. The scenario of the novel is chilling if not wholly original – the Nazis and their Japanese allies have won the Second World War. They rule over the former United States, where the novel is mostly set, as well as the rest of the world. In the novel’s alternate history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was assassinated (as he very nearly was) leading to the continuation of the Great Depression and US isolationism during World War II. Without American involvement the Nazis conquer Europe and Africa, and then join with the Japanese to defeat America.

Life under the Nazis is as barbaric as one might expect, although by the time of the events of the novel America is slowly coming to terms with being a defeated and occupied country. Japan has occupied most the Western side of the US and Germany the east, with a buffer zone of the “Pacific States of America” between them and a small Nazi puppet regime to the south. 

 

While victory was shared by the Japanese and the Nazis, the peace is clearly being won by the technologically superior Germans, who are already (the novel is set in the 1960s) sending men to Mars. This disparity of technology is to prove dangerous. The narrative is told through the eyes of several citizens of occupied America. An antique shop owner sells romanticized and often fake American cultural artifacts to Japanese trade officials and tourists. A high-ranking official visits the shop looking for a gift to impress a visiting Swedish industrialist. Meanwhile Frank Frink (formerly Fink), a secretly Jewish-American veteran, has lost his job and sets up a handcrafted jewelry business with a former colleague. His ex-wife meanwhile now lives in the neutral buffer zone and begins a relationship with a truck driver. Slowly Dick draws these story lines together to reveal the Nazis’ sinister intentions towards their former allies. 

A popular novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, depicting an alternative history in which the Allies won World War II. plays a key role in the narrative – a novel within a novel in which the central conceit is reversed. This inner novel haunts its readers with the suggestion that it in some strange way is actually a true representation of events, and the characters’s lives are themselves the fiction. In some ill-defined way the ‘truth’ is trying to impose itself on the fictional events portrayed. Dick leaves this idea unresolved at the end of the novel. 

It’s an intriguing if not particularly original central concept in the long tradition of invasion/alternate history novels. Not many works in this genre go so far as to imagining the US losing the war – even though Dick makes this plausible enough given the Nazis adapting nuclear technology before the Allies. Having set his scene, Dick seems a little lost where to go with it. This isn’t going to be a patriotic tale of valiant resistance fighters defeating the brutal invaders – in fact the Japanese seem perfectly civil, and there is no suggestion of their being an underground movement of any kind. The tensions between the remaining superpowers is well handled and convincing, and the descriptions of how Europe and Africa have suffered at the hands of the Nazis are chilling even if all-shown in passing references by the American characters. The eponymous Man in the High Castle is a bit of a disappointment – he is the author of the novel within the novel, but the High Castle ends up being just a suburban house, and the author only appears right at the end of the novel. He is not the omniscient, influential figure the title would suggest. 

I found the constant references to the prophetic powers of the I Ching quite irritating. Dick seems to take this nonsense seriously – certainly his characters do and there is nothing to suggest they are wrong to do so. The Japanese characters are all stereotypically inscrutable even when narrating the novel. All in all I couldn’t resist the feeling that there was a compelling story here trying but never quite succeeding to get out here, only appearing in flashes such as when the truck-driver is revealed as a German agent and is stopped by the plucky American judo-instructor. The television adaptation has wisely ignored almost all of the text, just using the central concept as a starting point, and as a result making a much richer, more interesting narrative.

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Book review

The Five – the untold lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims, by Hallie Rubenhold, 2019

The FiveThe central concept of this popular history book (by popular in this context I mean some of the claims are not as strictly evidenced as I would normally expect) is to tell the stories of the five “canonical” victims of the Ripper, the women generally accepted to be the victims of a single murderer operating in Whitechapel in 1888.

Inevitably the author cannot avoid drifting into speculation on how they came to their deaths, and it is here where the book has caused some controversy. Rubenhold disputes the widely held view that all of the victims were prostitutes. Her case seems strong here, although I haven’t read the counter-evidence which I am sure exists. She also argues powerfully that several of the women were killed while rough-sleeping; again this seems to make a lot of sense – they certainly were living a lifestyle where rough-sleeping would have been a necessity on occasion, even if the precise locations of their murders suggest unlikely places in which to bed down. 

But these issues are not the focus of the book. What the author aims to do is to tell these women’s stories – from their births to how they came to be on the street on those nights in 1888. What decisions and events led them there. If you knew nothing about these women and were to guess you would expect drink to play a part, and of course it does. Abusive relationships and personal tragedy are also involved. More widely the author is extremely strong on the social, political and economic context of the mid nineteenth century, including of course the housing and public health crises that were at the heart of these women’s tragic stories. Things were not all consistently bleak for these women – for example some of them were reasonably well educated for their class and generation. All had been in stable relationships (so far as we can tell) and had families from whom they had slowly been alienated. They were given support from employers, charities and housing associations. There was nothing inevitable about their deaths. 

In books of this kind one is always left wondering how much of the author’s reconstruction is speculation or educated guessing. A good example is the claim that Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, whilst selling pamphlets and so-called ‘gallows ballads’ was present at the execution of her cousin, Christopher Robinson, at Strafford in January 1866. The evidence that Catherine was present at the execution is flimsy to say the least, but here it is presented as unquestionable fact. (This is one issue were I took a quick look at some alternative sources). The other thing that is is hard to be clear on is how much of the text is the result of independent research, and how much is simply a reheating of existing knowledge about the victims. Because despite the widespread claim that this book is the first attempt to tell these women’s stories, there have been several previous such narratives, and there is arguably not much more to be found out.

Was this a genuine attempt to give a voice to these women, or yet another cynical exploitation of the frisson of excitement caused by the monstrous nature of the murders? I am happy to give the author the benefit of the doubt here. The narratives are all well-constructed, and the decision to end them at the point of the murders removes any hint of titillation. It was nice to see photographs of the victims others than on the mortuary slab. These photographs are remarkable, and if Rubenhold is the first historian to track them down (and I have no way of knowing if that is the case or not) then this in itself was a remarkable piece of historical detective work.

I think there was another way to give some value to these women’s lives, and that would have been to show how – if at all – their murders changed society. Did the way police investigate murders change? Did the way they treated vagrants and prostitutes change? Were the Whitechapel slums cleared? What, in other words, were the political and social impacts of the Ripper murders? But that’s obviously another book entirely.

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Book review

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Great first line. Always going to be a tough act to follow.

There are good ways and bad ways of reading a novel. Carefully, taking one’s time, out loud, all fall in the former category. Ten minutes at a time here and there spread over a month or so is definitely the wrong way to read any book, especially one as dense and complex as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. This was more from force of circumstance than a conscious decision, but I wouldn’t recommend it. One practical consequence was a serious problem with following the narrative, even down to the simple task of understanding the differences between the characters. Marquez didn’t make this easy (I say this not by way of complaint – it is not the author’s job to make their novels easy to read!) by having only a handful of recurring names for the novel’s many different characters.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of Macondo in Columbia. The story opens with the family patriarch, Arcadio Buendía, facing the firing squad for crimes against the Government. The narrative then takes the reader back to the founding of Macondo by the Buendía family. Initially Macondo is isolated from the outside world, apart from an annual visit by a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople technology such as magnets, telescopes, and ice. Melquíades, the gypsy king, becomes a recurring figure in the novel and the key to its final resolution. When Macondo becomes involved in the affairs of the wider world its troubles begin. A rigged election inspires Aureliano Buendía to join the rebellion against the Conservative government. I know how he feels.

The Buendia family saga feels longer that it is. The large cast of characters grow up, fall in love, or not, then die, to be succeeded steadily by the next generation with their own challenges and successes. It could have been the disjointed way I read this novel, but I found the steady march of the years made it difficult to engage with the characters who never made it off the page and became real for me.

100 years made a huge impact when it was first published, and remains highly thought of. The magical realism motif (I think I did well to get this far without using that term) was almost revolutionary at the time – it would be wrong to say it has become passe, but it certainly doesn’t have the same impact more than fifty years on. I enjoyed the light-hearted aspects of this novel the most, the way science and magic are blended together to prove that Arthur C Clarke saying that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.  The people of Macondo react in alarm and wonder to things such as films where an actor who dies in one film “reappears alive” in another, but take magic carpets in their stride.

There’s lots to enjoy in this novel. Some characters will appeal, and if they don’t another (probably with the same name) will appear soon enough. The prose is poetic and usually stays the right side of over the top. Some scenes are comic, others more disturbing, but I don’t think it takes itself too seriously despite the serious themes.

Finally I leave you with this review from a reader who took the trouble to post a review online, but didn’t take a lot of trouble with the reading of the novel itself:

“(It) didn’t do much for me; just a load of people sitting on a mat, munching.”

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Book review

Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1932

Laughter in the Dark is a early novel by Vladimir Nabokov that contains some of the ideas and themes that he was to return to in the later Lolita.nabokov

First, a quick plot summary: Albinus is a prosperous middle-aged art critic living in 1920’s Berlin, who in a classic mid-life crisis takes a mistress, the amoral 17-year-old Margot. Margot is interested only in Albinus’s money, and quickly engineers a split between him and his wife. Margot wants to be in the movies, and Albinus indulges this and her every other fantasy, even though she is clearly a dreadful actress. The first of a series of crises then begins to afflict Albinus. His young daughter dies from pneumonia. He unknowingly reintroduces Margot to one of her former lovers, Axel Rex, with whom she almost immediately resumes an ‘intimate’ relationship. A holiday to the south of France accompanied by Rex, who has persuaded Albinus he is gay and therefore not a threat, goes as badly as you might expect, setting them all up for a tragic (if also comic) finale.

This is a relatively slight novel.  While it contains echoes of Lolita, it has none of that novel’s power and compelling characters. This was to me a previously unknown Nabokov, which is always cause for some excitement – I think he is one of the colossus of twentieth century literature – but there is little in Laughter in the Dark to detain the reader for long. The characters do not linger in the memory – they are all either vile and amoral – Margot and Axel in particular are two-dimensional villains without a shadow of nuance – or weak and uninteresting. Even Albinus’s brother in law Paul, who shows a bit of gumption when he finds out he is being defrauded by Margot and Axel, travelling to their holiday retreat and confronting them, is ultimately unable to intervene and prevent tragedy occurring. It’s not really a tragedy however – we don’t care enough about the characters to be upset when they meet their fate – but it’s not that comic either. The scenes where Axel taunts the blinded Albinus are cruel and unsettling, and probably come closest to tragi-comedy.

I keep however coming back to those echoes between this novel and Lolita. The latter is dominated by Humbert Humbert’s lust for his step-daughter, his consuming obsession with her youthful body. Light of my loins, etc. Lolita is portrayed as being indifferent to or even a bit bored by this obsession – she is aware of Humbert’s feelings and is able to manipulate him by using them, but she doesn’t reciprocate them. Or at least that is what the narrator in Lolita, Humbert, tells the reader. In fact it is clear that this is not the case, and that Lolita is repulsed by her abuser (see my review for a lot more on this). Humbert prefers his choice of narrative because it both explains her lack of affection for him and justifies his abuse. So there are two narratives – what Humbert is telling us is happening, and what the author reveals is going on behind Humbert’s self-justification. He is honest about his lust, but dishonest in his portrait of Lolita’s response. He pretends to be harsh on himself – she never really loved me – to disguise the fact he was abusing her all the time.

The relationship between Albinus and Margot is a pale imitation of this later ‘relationship’. Margot casually reciprocates Albinus’s lust. “She on her part was always ready to respond to his lovemaking; it only refreshed her” (note the “only”).

Here she is described after a day on the beach, putting on a show for Albinus:

“In the cool room with the red-tiled floor…Margot, snake-like, shuffled off her black skin, (her swimsuit) and, with nothing on but high-heeled slippers, clicked up and down the room, eating a sibilant peach; and stripes of sunshine crossed and recrossed her body”. (chapter 14).

I can’t think of another writer who would have described the act of eating a peach, in itself obviously sexual, as “sibilant”. Margot uses sex with Albinus as a way of getting what she wants – she tells him not to lay a hand on her until he has spoken to his wife about a divorce. Lolita, several years younger, is unable to exercise this form of power, even though Humbert consistently tries to portray her as behaving that way. So the equivalence between Margot and Lolita that some readers might be tempted to make is utterly wrong, even if both men see them in the same way. Albinus and Humbert are both dirty old men tempted by much younger women, but only one is a step-parent and child-abuser. Laughter in the Dark is at the same time a simpler and less troubling novel than its successor, but doesn’t ever escape from its shadow.

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