Tag Archives: Book review

Book review

Witches Abroad, (Discworld 12) by Terry Pratchett, 1991

Is it possible to have two favourite Discworld books? I have three favourite children after all, so conceptually it should be possible. Were it to be deemed so by the powers that be, then ‘Witches Abroad’ would definitely be my joint favourite Discworld novel alongside Witches-abroad-cover‘The Night Watch’. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, her perfect foil, and Magrat Garlick on a road trip across the Disc, travelling through a landscape of fairy stories brought to life by Lilith de Tempscire, Granny’s evil sister. Just perfect!

Granny and Nanny are two of my favourite Discworld characters – Magrat is a wet hen, and I can take her or leave her – and together they are wonderful. Nanny Ogg is sometimes overshadowed by Granny’s awesomeness, but her she is in full flow, a force of nature that bulldozes its way across the Disc, all the way to Genua. Genua is a coastal town with an annual celebration called Fat Lunchtime, a tradition of cooking based around gumbo and, and all in all bears a strong resemblance to New Orleans.

Witches Abroad also contains the greatest Discworld story Sir Terry never wrote. At the end of this novel, when the bad guys have been defeated and order restored, the witches have a choice – to go home, or to go and “see the elephant”, a colloquial expression for going home the long way, continuing their holiday as much as possible. They agree to see the elephant, and the reader is left to picture what a glorious, outrageous adventure that would have been. (If it turns out that this novel was actually written, and I have just forgotten it, which is quite possible, I will be both deeply embarrassed and hugely delighted).

So what is it about this novel that makes it so full of wonder? It can’t be the jokes, because they almost all qualify as ‘dad’ jokes – even the title is a pretty silly play on words (Witches Abroad = witches out and about, and also in foreign lands). Or try this schoolboyish fun with the fact that in some languages words have gender, which might be funny if you are 11

“‘S called the Vieux River.”
– “Yes?”
– “Know what that means?”
– “No.”
– “The Old (Masculine) River,” said Nanny.
– “Yes?”
– “Words have sex in foreign parts,” said Nanny hopefully.”

Or here’s another joke, when the witches see a stuffed lion’s head:

By gor’, that’s a bloody enormous cat.’
‘It’s a lion,’ said Granny Weatherwax, looking at the stuffed head over the fireplace.
‘Must’ve hit the wall at a hell of a speed, whatever it was,’ said Nanny Ogg.
‘Someone killed it,’ said Granny Weatherwax, surveying the room.
‘Should think so,’ said Nanny.  ‘If I’d seen something like that eatin’ its way through the wall I’d of hit it myself with a poker.”

OK, silly jokes yes, but slapstick can be funny?

Is it the ‘world building’? (“The process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe. The resulting world may be called a constructed world.”) I think this is getting closer. STP made no attempt to make the basic concept of Discworld anything other than fun, but over time he developed a geography and history for the world that within its own constraints – it is balanced on a turtle carrying four elephants after all – is believable. Is it the story-telling? Definitely not. One of the joys of rereading these novels is rediscovering (and then quickly re-forgetting) what happens, because what happens is usually not very important. We know the good guys are going to win, and the demons from the Dungeon Dimensions are going to be defeated in that somewhat vague way that most of these novels deploy to resolve matters. In the tradition of most great story writers STP borrows plot lines freely and openly, even going so far in this novel to make that borrowing itself part of the plot. Dracula, The Wizard of Oz, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, – you name it, STP borrows from it.

So what’s left? It would be wrong to use the term “philosophy”, but the underlying humanism of the author’s perspective on the world shines out from every one of his novels. He has profound insights into the human (and dwarven, troll and other life-forms) condition. You really have to read the books to get this point properly, but for now how about this from Granny Weatherwax?

“You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.”

Lastly, there are the novel’s extraordinary, deeply loved, characters. I’ve written at length in previous Discworld reviews about Granny, Nanny and Sam Vimes in particular, so I am not going to repeat myself too much other than to say they are utterly magnificent, utterly believable, and full of the humanity that makes these novels some of my favourites on the planet. Sorry, roundworld.

 

 

Standard
Book review

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino, 1979

Post-modernist. There, I’ve said it. It’s impossible to review this novel without using this term, so I might as well get it out of the way, and hopefully not come back to its constraining definitions.

Published in the original Italian in 1979 and translated into English shortly thereafter, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a boldly experimental novel that parades its cleverness, but tiptoes at times close to disappearing up its own narrative fundament.

It’s hard to describe what the novel is about, mainly because it is about itself. It begins with a discussion on what it means to read a novel, a discussion that continues intermittently throughout the book. What narrative structure there is concern events that the narrator describes as happening to the reader and your adventures in reading Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Got that? This self-consciously subverts every tradition of story-telling, even though novels about novels are actually not that new. The structure of the novel sees the hypothetical reader begin reading a series of texts, each abruptly brought to a close, followed by an attempt to find the next chapter, introducing a new text at each attempt.  This quickly settles down to a predictable formula – we know the text is going to be incomplete and a new one will start soon.

I found this a hard read. Yes, I managed to finish it, but I was hoping to be dazzled. I have had this novel on my shelves for literally decades, always trying to find the right time to read it, and never quite getting there. My mistake I believe was to try and read it in short bursts on my commute. This is a demanding novel that needs the full force of your concentration, preferably with a pen and notebook to hand, not snatched ten or fifteen minute reads over two weeks or more. It just doesn’t flow as easily as most novels, fragmented as it is. I kept hoping at one point the pieces would click into place and a whole would be revealed to be so much more than the parts. Perhaps if I had read it more carefully that would have happened, but as it was it felt predictable and at times even puerile. Commentary on the experience of reading is interesting, but on its own does not have enough substance to create a novel, however much you mix it with many brief introductions to stories. What probably seemed revolutionary and exciting in 1979 seemed dated and forced in 2019.

I have enjoyed many meta-narratives before now, such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to give one obvious example, so I am certainly open to the idea, but the funny, clever, intelligent novel I was hoping for never turned up. Perhaps my yearning for a story is childish. One day I hope to reread If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller again, this time with the care it demands, and maybe then I will eat my words.

Standard
Book review

Reaper Man (Discworld 11) by Terry Pratchett, 1991

As the reaction to my Facebook post about Pyramids (Discworld 7) attests, the Discworld novels are hugely loved by a community of readers across the world. People love the novels for many reasons, but I think one of the most common reason is the enormous empathy that Sir Terry shared with his readers. He knew our weaknesses and frailties, 220px-Reaper-man-coverand saw the inner strength in the most abject of us, the deluded, the vulnerable. No-one is so much of a misfit that they don’t have a place in Ankh-Morpork’s Watch; no-one is beyond redemption, as Moist von Lipwig’s story shows. And the weakest and frailest of us all know that one day we will face death, or perhaps Death. So it is his crowning achievement that he made Death such a human, kind character, and that novels such as Reaper Man which are all about Death and death, can be so warm and touching.

Ok, I get it, enough fan-boying, if that’s a word. In this the eleventh Discworld novel, the Auditors of Reality object to Death developing a personality, so decide to ‘retire’ him. In facing up to the death of Death he leaves his job collecting souls, and spends his remaining days working as a farm hand imaginatively named Bill Door for the elderly Miss Flitworth, another of STP’s astonishingly well realised older female characters.

But the absence of death is not entirely unproblematic. A ‘life force’ (of some kind, STP is vague on the detail) starts to cause poltergeist activity and lots of other weirdness. Windle Poons a senior wizard is disappointed not to be met by death on his passing, and becomes a charmingly polite but determined zombie, joining an undead-rights group. The ‘action’ scenes in which Ankh-Morpork is slowly invaded by a parasitic lifeform which evolves into a shopping centre are heavily cut between the Bill Door scenes, but this doesn’t effectively disguise their clumsiness as satirical comment on consumerism. In the novel’s touching climax Death is given a little more time and spends it on a last dance with Miss Flitworth.

One of the many joys of a Discworld reread is rediscovering the origin stories of some of Sir Terry’s wonderful characters. Reg Shoe, undead rights activist, first appears here, although it is not until much later in the glorious Night Watch that we discover how he came to zombiedom. The Death of Rats also first appears in this novel. But Death takes centre stage here, rightly so, and carried the novel on his bony shoulders. Another triumph Sir Terry.

Standard
Book review

Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, by E W Hornung, 1899

Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman has not aged well. While his contemporary Sherlock Holmes has prospered in the twenty-first century, with films, television adaptation and yet more ‘inspired by’ novels, Raffles languishes largely forgotten. In this post I am going to explore the reasons for this neglect and suggest a possible way back into the stories.Raffles

Raffles, conceived by Hornung as a counterpoint to his brother-in-law Conan-Doyle’s master detective, is the archetypal gentleman thief. By day, he is a member of London society, and a noted cricketer. By night he is a burglar – a ‘cracksman’. His accomplice and biographer is Bunny Manders, who narrates these stories and looks up to Raffles, one might even say adores him. But more of the homo-erotic undertones of the stories in a moment.

In his wonderful essay Raffles and Miss Blandish, George Orwell compared the Hornung stories with a more contemporary detective tale which offended his sensibilities. He described Raffles as

still one of the best-known characters in English fiction. Very few people would need telling that he played cricket for England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the Mayfair houses which he also entered as a guest.

That was in 1944, but the same could certainly not be said now. Orwell’s anatomy of Raffles centres on the acute observation that the

“truly dramatic thing, about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to this day… is the fact that he is a gentleman. Raffles is presented to us and this is rubbed home in countless scraps of dialogue and casual remarks — not as an honest man who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has disgraced ‘the old school’, he has lost his right to enter ‘decent society’, he has forfeited his amateur status and become a cad…In making Raffles a cricketer as well as a burglar, Hornung was not merely providing him with a plausible disguise; he was also drawing the sharpest moral contrast that he was able to imagine.

But this is not all, because with his laser-like precision on matters of class, Orwell identifies that while Raffles may be a gentleman, his position in society is less secure than a casual reader might think:

Raffles…is a story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the precariousness of Raffles’s social position. A cruder writer would have made the ‘gentleman burglar’ a member of the peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles, however, is of upper-middle-class origin and is only accepted by the aristocracy because of his personal charm. ‘We were in Society but not of it’, he says to Bunny towards the end of the book; and ‘I was asked about for my cricket’. Both he and Bunny accept the values of ‘Society’ unquestioningly, and would settle down in it for good if only they could get away with a big enough haul. The ruin that constantly threatens them is all the blacker because they only doubtfully ‘belong’. A duke who has served a prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about town, if once disgraced, ceases to be ‘about town’ for evermore. 

Well, as we will see, there are different forms of disgrace.

Much, perhaps too much, has been made of Raffles’s relationship with Holmes. Hornung didn’t help this reflex reaction by dedicating this book to “ACD” and suggesting the stories were a form of flattery. A criminal version of Holmes would indeed have been fascinating, but Raffles doesn’t fit the bill. He is far too clumsy a thief, relying on crude strategems including violence, and is very nearly caught by the police, something that would never happen to Holmes. In the second story in this collection, ‘A Costume Piece” Raffles tries to steal jewels from the millionaire Reuben Rosenthall. He breaks into his house, only to be captured red-handed by the alert Rosenthall and companions who were waiting for him all along. He escapes by the simple strategem of running away, although he does come back later to rescue the hapless Bunny, disguised as a policeman. In another story, ‘Gentlemen and Players’, Raffles secures an invitation to a country house party. The rich visitors seem easy pickings, but a complicating factor involves a successful burglary by some professional thieves. Raffles takes the opportunity afforded by the theft of walking into the victim’s bedroom and taking her remaining jewels. No bravery, cunning nor skill required, just an invitation to the right kind of house party.

We are constantly told Raffles is a gentleman, but his code of ethics is not as clear cut as you would expect. He is quite prepared to murder his blackmailer for example, and only avoids doing so because someone has beaten him to it. In fact the scene where Raffles first contemplates murder is chilling in its amorality; Raffles seems alive with the thrilling prospect of the crime:

The biggest man alive is the man who’s committed a murder and not yet been fund out… Just think of it! Think of coming in here and talking to the men, very likely about the murder itself, and knowing you’ve done it; and wondering how they’d look if they knew! Oh it would be great, simply great! 

Bunny – and what a childish nickname for a grown man to have – adores him. The Wikipedia entry for Hornung  claims that Raffles and Bunny were “were based partly on his friends Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas”. By 1898, the year the first Raffles story was published, Wilde had already completed his prison sentence for perjury, and was living in Paris. His name became synonymous with homosexuality, and it would have been a brave author who openly used Wilde’s relationship with Douglas as a model for his characters. But the homo-eroticism between Raffles and Bunny, albeit a somewhat one-sided attraction of the younger man for his hero, is undeniable. They first meet at school, where Bunny is Raffles’s “fag”; when the stories begin Bunny has lost all his money gambling, is facing disgrace, and is considering suicide. Raffles offers him a way out of his troubles – an exciting and seductive new life of sin and crime.

Once Raffles and Bunny’s ‘crimes’ are seen as a metaphor for gay love, the stories come alive as an “in plain sight” confession of “the love that dare not speak its name”. In fact it is hard to read many of their exchanges without spotting a gay sub-text.

I’ll do it again…I will…I’ll lend you a hand as often as you like! What does it matter now? I’ve been in it once. I’ll be in it again. I’ve gone to the devil anyhow. I can’t go back, and wouldn’t if I could. Nothing matters another rap! When you want me I’m your man.

Bunny repeatedly tries to break away (break up?) from Raffles – he knows what he represents is wrong, but finds it compellingly attractive, both hating and wanting it at the same time. When in “The Return Match” Raffles seeks him out, lays his hand on his arm and says “Come up to my place”, Bunny can’t resist:

“To me, at all events, there was never anybody in the world so irresistible as Raffles…I made my excuses …but his arm slide through mine…and even while I argued we were on his staircase in the Albany.”

Elsewhere Bunny is openly affectionate towards Raffles, and comes close to accepting his feelings:

It was Raffles I loved. It was not the dark life we led together, still less its base rewards; it was the man himself, his gayety, his humour, his dazzling audacity, his incomparable courage and resource. And a very horror of turning to him again in mere need of greed set the seal on my first angry resolution. But the anger was soon gone out of me, and when at length Raffles bridged the gap by coming to me, I rose to greet him almost with a shout.

This affection burns at its brightest when Bunny is tortured by jealously seeing Raffles flirt with a young Australian women on their ill-fated cruise in The Gift of the Emperor:

What he could see in her—but that begs the question. Of course he saw no more than I did, but to annoy me, or perhaps to punish me for my long defection, he must turn his back on me and devote himself to this chit from Southampton to the Mediterranean. They were always together. It was too absurd. After breakfast they would begin, and go on until eleven or twelve at night; there was no intervening hour at which you might not hear her nasal laugh, or his quiet voice talking soft nonsense into her ear. Of course it was nonsense! Is it conceivable that a man like Raffles, with his knowledge of the world, and his experience of women (a side of his character upon which I have purposely never touched, for it deserves another volume); is it credible, I ask, that such a man could find anything but nonsense to talk by the day together to a giddy young schoolgirl? I would not be unfair for the world.

I think I have admitted that the young person had points. Her eyes, I suppose, were really fine, and certainly the shape of the little brown face was charming, so far as mere contour can charm.

I admit also more audacity than I cared about, with enviable health, mettle, and vitality. I may not have occasion to report any of this young lady’s speeches (they would scarcely bear it), and am therefore the more anxious to describe her without injustice. I confess to some little prejudice against her. I resented her success with Raffles, of whom, in consequence, I saw less and less each day. It is a mean thing to have to confess, but there must have been something not unlike jealousy rankling within me.

References to their physical attraction for one another, the compelling nature of their relationship, the enjoyment of one another’s company, and the recognition that what they are engaged in is wrong by the moral code of society, but thrilling and rewarding nonetheless, crowd the stories’ pages. Raffles toys with Bunny’s affection, keeping him guessing at all times about his motivation. Bunny blindly follows wherever Raffles leads, even when it ends up in a prison cell.

I suspect the simple reason why Raffles is no longer read widely, is that despite this interesting element of modernity, the stories are just not very good. Raffles rarely has a cunning plan of any kind, and Bunny is so dim that the fun of understanding more than him about what is going on palls quickly. Raffles isn’t half as charming or interesting as he thinks he is. Add to that some appalling racism which yes, is of its time, but which Conan Doyle somehow managed to largely avoid, and these stories are not yet ready for a revival. Perhaps when this inevitably happens it will involve a degree of reinvention that they sorely need.

Standard
Book review

Moving Pictures (Discworld 10) by Terry Pratchett, 1990

Moving Pictures

At this point (1990) in his writing career, Terry Pratchett was producing two Discworld novels a year. He’d published Sourcery (Discworld 5) and Wyrd Sisters (DW 6) in 1988, Pyramids (DW 7) and Guards! Guards! (DW 8) in 1989, and Eric (DW 9) already in 1990, before he produced Moving Pictures for the Christmas sales at the end of the year. By any reckoning this is an extraordinary sustained level of output, all the more so given that Moving Pictures is such a rich and cleverly written novel.

I am fairly sure when Sir Terry was writing these novels there was no overall grand plan in his head. (I may have read that somewhere). People have retrospectively tried to impose some order on the novels, and grouped them around the principal topics – the Witches series, the City Watch series, and so on. Several of the Discworld novels use as their inspiration the coming of round world technology to the Disc – The Truth (printing), Going Postal (Clacks/telegrams), Raising Steam (trains) and so on. Monstrous Regiment is sometimes included in this group but I am not sure why – maybe it will become clearer when I eventually reread it!) These groupings can be contentious, but they do make the series more accessible to new converts to the cause of all things Pratchett, so are therefore a good thing. Moving Pictures is the first in the Industrial Revolution series of novels, and is a quite affectionate satire on the rise of cinema in the early part of the twentieth century, the Century of the Fruitbat.

Pratchett isn’t interested in subtly disguising his targets, so the small out of the way coastal area where movies begin to be made is called Holy Wood. Holy Wood is watched over by a guardian who performs strange rituals to protect the site from the strange spirits that are trapped in the hill. When the guardian dies, sand starts to trickle away from Holy Wood Hill, allowing the spirits or some kind of unpleasant entity to escape. It quickly infiltrates the vulnerable minds of the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork. Alchemists are a disgruntled group of marginalised not-quite wizards, best known for blowing themselves up and turning gold into less gold. Without quite understanding how, the alchemists quickly invent cinema – moving pictures – and decide to decamp to Holy Wood, starting a gold-rush of sorts as people head out to the coast in search of stardom, bedazzled by the glamour of Holy Wood. One such ingenue is Victor Tugelbend, the oldest student in the Unseen University, skilled at not passing his exams. He sets out to become a star, followed by numerous citizens of the capital including Cut My Own Throat Dibbler, Detritus, a troll bouncer from the Mended Drum, and Gaspode the Wonder Dog, who between them represent some of Discworld most popular secondary characters.

Victor breaks into the movies, literally, with the help of the talking Gaspode, and is introduced to Ginger, his co-star. All the while people are largely unaware of the strange magic that Holy Wood is casting over them. There’s a lot of scene setting as Pratchett lays the ground the novel’s finale, but it’s worth it. The pay off is a magnificent parody of King Kong and Gone With the Wind. Pratchett scatters funny references to movies throughout the novel – this is probably the richest novel for this feature, often with several clever little references to cinema or other aspects of popular culture on every page. This must make it a nightmare to translate!

Moving Pictures is of course much more than an affectionate parody of the film industry. Cinema is in any event something of a soft target – the early days of the movies in particular were ridiculous in so many ways, but they did give us some great films. They did cause people to behave out of character, but was there really any great harm done? So this is not a satire with any significant purpose, more a very light-hearted, at times even silly, commentary on the industry. There’s so much to enjoy here, from spotting the references to the wonderfully strong cast of characters, many such as Gaspode making their first substantial appearance in the series. There is a darker element to some of the Discworld novels, but it is almost completely missing here – whatever it is that escapes from Holy Wood Hill and infects the minds of men, women and animals, is ill-defined but relatively easily defeated.

Pratchett always has something interesting to say even when his is being at his most light-hearted, such as this wonderful paraphrasing of A Room of One’s Own:

“You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?… It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it’s even possible to find out. It’s all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It’s all the wasted chances.” 

Eric was undoubtedly a blip, something that had all the hallmarks of a rush job, but Moving Pictures was equally obviously written with love and care. It’s wonderful, and a great place to start the collection if you have spurned the chances offered by Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards!

Standard
Book review

Eric, by Terry Pratchett, (Discworld 9) 1990

Eric, the ninth Discworld novel, was originally published as a Discworld story to distinguish it from its predecessors in the series. It came in a large format with illustrations throughout by Pratchett’s then cover illustrator, Josh Kirby.eric

This is going to make me hugely unpopular with Pratchett fans everywhere, but I have never been a big fan of Kirby’s work on the Discworld covers. For a start the emphasis seems always on under-dressed young women in various states of peril. If this was done tongue in cheek then he might have got away with it now and again, but the covers are essentially childish, and the books are not. I think this didn’t help Pratchett get the recognition his work deserved, and although a new illustrator took over when Kirby died in 2001, by then a lot of the damage had been done. Brandon Sanderson once famously wrote of STP (in an essay which described the Discworld novels as “the highest form of literature on the planet” which even I think it a bit of a stretch) that

“I’m embarrassed by how long it took me to discover Terry Pratchett. I avoided him during much of my early reading career”.

Could it be that Sanderson was put off by the covers perhaps?

(Incidentally, since writing this I have also found this quote from Sir Terry himself on LSpace.org, The Annotated Pratchett file:

The next UK paperback reprint of TCOM (they do a couple a year) will not have a Kirby cover. This is an experiment — there’s been feedback to me and to Transworld that suggests there are a large number of potential DW readers out there who think they don’t like fantasy and don’t get past the Kirby covers.”

Well there you have it.)

Anyway, Eric is now available widely without the art work, as are all the Discworld novels, so each to his own. Eric is a gently humorous retelling of the story of Faust, as the front cover of most editions with the word Faust struck through and replaced by the word Eric leaves little doubt about. It’s part of the continuing adventures of Rincewind, the original Discworld hero, who we left trapped in the Dungeon Dimensions at the end of Sourcery.

Rincewind is summoned out of these dimensions by a teenage demonologist, Eric, who like all teenagers wants to meet the most beautiful woman in the world, live forever, etc. Rincewind is compelled to play the part of the world’s least convincing demon, although strangely he does seem to have powers to fulfil Eric’s wishes. A very unfunny parrot provides a form of chorus as they travel to Klatch, followed shortly behind by the luggage, to Troy, or the Discworld equivalent Tsort, and finally Hell. There’s a ‘doing it by numbers’ feel to the plot, closely following as it does the source story, with only glimpses of the humour and thoughtfulness that characterises a typical Discworld novel. After they escape from Hell – of course – and go on their way, the story pretty much peters out rather than ending with any satisfying conclusion.

Normally I am falling over quotes to use in a post about a Discworld novel – with Eric that’s more of a challenge. For example:

“What’re quantum mechanics?”

“I don’t know. People who repair quantums, I suppose.”

just isn’t that funny, is it, let alone telling us something essential about life as the best STP quotes often do. Or take this below-par use of the word ‘horology’, I hesitate to call it a pun, which only Eric would be amused by:

“The Tezuman priests have a sophisticated calendar and an advanced horology,” quoted Rincewind.
“Ah,” said Eric, “Good.”
“No,” said Rincewind patiently. “It means time measurement.”

“Oh.”

I am not going to labour the point, this was a bit of a dud, and I am going to move swiftly on to the wonders of some of later novels.

 

Standard
Book review

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, 2017

lincoln

When Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Booker prize, much of the media coverage focused on the apparent ‘difficulty of the novel’, probably encouraged by Saunders’s interviews on the topic. In fact the novel is wonderfully accessible, once the reader has adapted to the slightly unusual narrative technique.

The novel has many different narrators – by one count over 160 – and it cuts quickly between these different voices. On the page it is presented like this:

An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.
hans vollman

This was highly irregular. It was after hours; the front gate would be locked.
the reverend everly thomas

The boy had been delivered only that day. That is to say, the man had most likely been here –
roger bevins iii

Quite recently.
hans vollman

As you can see, the author has helpfully indicated which character is speaking, which is normally fine – I found myself quickly adapting to this technique, which seems a commonsense way of avoiding the “he said, she said” reporting of conversation which can be dull. Often it is not particularly important which character is narrating, because the three above act largely as a kind of chorus to the action, finishing one another’s sentences, as here, but when it matters it is simple enough to check. Less frequent narrators are usually given distinctive voices, speech patterns, or language. Note incidentally that it is virtually impossible to describe this approach without using the language of the spoken word – voice, speech, speaking, etc. This is because these sections of the novel are effectively a script. If the text was written this way it would not be a cause for comment or seen in any way as difficult:

Hans Vollman: “An exceedingly tall and unkempt fellow was making his way toward us through the darkness.”

The reverend Everly Thomas: “This was highly irregular. It was after hours; the front gate would be locked.”

Roger Bevins III: “The boy had been delivered only that day. That is to say, the man had most likely been here.”

Lincoln in the Bardo takes as its inspiration the death from typhoid of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, in 1862, as the civil war was beginning to take a toll on both sides. In his grief Lincoln visited the crypt where his son was interred. Saunders cuts between historical details of the event taken from what appears to have been a lot of research with a much stranger story in which Willie’s spirit is received by the ghosts of the cemetery, who in turn reveal their own personal accounts of how they died. “Bardo” is apparently the Tibetan Buddhist name for a form of purgatory, a transition period between death and rebirth which is where these ghosts choose to remain, mostly refusing to accept the fact of their deaths.

lincoln2

Abraham and Willie

They instead believe themselves to be injured, but with a chance of exiting their “sick-boxes” (a euphemism for coffins) and returning to their former lives. They argue that as they are able to think and feel, they cannot be dead, although the word itself is scrupulously avoided. The principal narrators, quoted above, are Hans Vollman, who longs to return to his unconsummated marriage, forever cursed him with a freakishly engorged member, Roger Bevins iii, ashamed of his gay feelings, who cut his wrists only to change his mind moments too late, and Reverend Thomas, hiding in the Bardo from the threat of eternal damnation, and trying to find in his memories the reason for his fall.

The arrival of young Willie provides a distraction from the eternity of waiting they face, as they struggle to persuade him to move on. He is reluctant to do so because of his grieving father’s visits. Saunders builds a compelling portrait of these and the other inhabitants of the bardo, a cast of desperate, sad, lonely and disturbed “survivors” refusing to accept the fact of their own deaths, under regular siege from recruiters – angels or demons – from the next world. Many of the ghosts are hideously deformed with physical representations of their moral failings or the worries that tie them to the world of the living: for example a miser is “compelled to float horizontally, like a human compass needle, the top of his head facing in the direction of whichever of his properties he found himself most worried about at the moment”. These sections of the novel are often disturbing – the idea of death as something that can be ignored by strength of will alone is not in itself original, but the troubled lives of so many of Saunders’s characters are sometimes not easy to read. The portrait of Lincoln, a devastated father trying to continue his burdensome duties as President, is convincing, and strikes a different tone from the strangely light, almost comic scenes in the cemetery. Lincoln comes to see his bereavement as the price he must pay for committing his country to a war in which so many other sons and fathers were to die.

I can see why this novel won the Booker, although I confess I have not read any of the other short-listed candidates. This was a £1 charity shop buy of a near immaculate copy – someone obviously wasn’t that impressed – which always makes the read that little bit sweeter!

 

Standard
Book review

We Have Always lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, 1962

I’m trying to read more authors I haven’t read before. Shirley Jackson is a writer I have heard about mainly through references to her chilling short story, The Lottery. As I understand it, The Lottery is widely read in American schools, although it is much less well known in the UK. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was Jackson’s final novel, published three

we have always

years before her death, and tells the story of two sisters, Mary Katherine (Merricat) and Constance Blackwood, who live with their aging and infirm uncle Julian in their isolated home in New England. The Blackwoods were and are a prosperous family. They remain aloof from the common people of the village and make them walk around their property to reach the main road rather than allowing them a short cut across their estate. This creates tension between the villagers and the Blackwoods, tension which turns ugly later in the novel.

Merricat narrates the tale, and it is clear from the opening that this is not a normal family:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

Older sister Constance never ventures further than the garden in the grounds of the family home. We soon learn why – she was tried and acquitted of murdering her family by poisoning their sugar bowl. Although sometimes described as a mystery, it doesn’t take Holmesian powers of deduction to work out who the real poisoner is – the character with the morbid obsession with death, who has sadistic fantasies about the people of the village who taunt her on her twice weekly shopping trips:

“I am walking on their bodies”

“I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die”

“I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all… lying there crying with the pain and dying”.

Merricat is a troubled young woman. She uses a primitive, childish form of witchcraft to protect her family, marking the boundary of their property with fetishes and totems. She is consumed with harmful thoughts and haunted by OCD rituals. At this point in the story Constance’s mental health, in particular her agoraphobia, appears to be recovering. She welcomes visitors and talks of going down to the village. Merricat feels threatened by this change, but this is nothing compared to her reaction when Cousin Charles, clearly more interested in the contents of the Blackwood family safe than the sisters themselves, comes to visit. Merricat’s murderous fantasies become even more vivid :

I wanted to stamp on him after he was dead, and see him lying dead on the grass.”

“I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. I could bury him in the hole where my box of silver dollars had been so safe until he came; if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.”

Charles’s arrival disturbs the delicate equilibrium of the house and Merricat’s mental health, and things quickly deteriorate. As Merricat desperately tries to drive him away she starts a fire which goes on to destroy much of the house, transforming it into the castle of the novel’s title, with an upper floor open to the elements like battlements. Uncle Julian dies in the fire and Charles flees. Merricat and Constance make a home in the ruins of their house, and this is where the story eventually leaves them, hidden from the rest of the world but finally accepted by the villagers.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a troubling tale which leaves the reader with many questions. Why did Constance not find her psychopathic sister the help that she so obviously needs? Why did no-one in the village work out the fairly simple puzzle about the identity of the family’s killer? How are the sisters going to survive in their ruins?

Merricat is an absorbing portrait of mental illness – but is We Have Always more than that? Does it have anything to say about American society, and about the way it treats outsiders? Merricat’s narrative voice is powerful, and can easily distract the reader into thinking that her account of the novel’s events, flawed though it is, is authentic, rather than seen through the distorting lens of her mental illness. We never get to know what precipitated her murderous attack on her family, but it is safe to say it was probably something trivial that lead to her being sent to her room that day. She certainly doesn’t see herself as a mass murderer; in many ways she is still a child, without any understanding of the consequences of her actions. She starts the fire that destroys their home, and although the volunteer firemen of the village put it out, saving the ground floor, they then go on to trash the house.

While the novel ends on a happy-ever-after note for Merricat and Constance, we can tell that their isolated way of life will not last long. Is this a parable for American society, that has survived the chaos and destruction of the second world war, but is living on borrowed time?

Standard
Book review

Patronising Bastards, by Quentin Letts, 2017

Quentin Letts is a sketchwriter for the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper characterised by two predominant emotions- fear and hatred.  (The Mail is frightened of, and therefore hates, difference and change. It hates foreigners, the EU, the BBC, socialists, liberals, remainers, health and safety, and political correctness. It loathes Jeremy Corbyn. So it is hardly surprising that this rambling collection of short essays is dominated by hatred of the above.

Letts had a modest amount of success with an earlier book, 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, and this is just more of the same – a series of sketches loosely connected by the theme of people whom Letts finds patronising, although ‘people I disagree with” would be a more accurate summary. His targets range far and wide, and there is a random feel to attacks that span Nicholas Serota, Bob Shennan, an obscure radio programmer who had the temerity to move one of Letts’ favourite programmes, Richard Branson, Ian McEwan, Sandi Toksvig and Sir Ivan Rogers. No, I hadn’t hear of him either.

It is entirely understandable that Letts would use hyperbole as his go-to technique. Part of the problem with this book as he really doesn’t have any other way of approaching his subjects – the people he writes about are all mean patronising bastards, and there’s little if any light and shade in his portraits.

Personal insults abound. Obama is described as “feted mainly for being black” which is openly racist as far as I am concerned, Camila Batmanghelidjh is described as “that” (ditto, and sexist for good measure), Dame Judi Murray is a “great cow walrus“, and so on. Dame Vivienne Westwood must really have upset Letts at some point, because he is appalled when she revealed that she went commando to Buckingham Palace one time, saying “Sorry about the swarm of bluebottles, your Maj“. Yes, that’s right isn’t it Quentin, women’s genitals attract flies don’t they? Elsewhere she is “gurning termagant“. He describes Sandi Toksvig and “Sir Sandi” and Gary Lineker as “Dame Gary”. See what he did there – deliberately confused their gender to make fun of them. Hold my sides.

One of the persistent characteristics of Brexiteers is their tendency to portray themselves as outsiders, anti-establishment figures campaigning for the little man. Letts doesn’t really fit that bill (neither does Nigel Farage of course). He has written for The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and The Times, amongst others. He was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, Bellarmine College, Kentucky (now Bellarmine University), Trinity College, Dublin, and then studied Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1982–86) at Jesus College, Cambridge, taking a Diploma in Classical Archaeology. Quite the outsider!

Given all this it was a bit disturbing when I found myself agreeing with one of Letts’ observations on the cultural significance of Church of England hymns. It wasn’t a particularly political point, but he writes well on the importance of hymns in our cultural history and collective experience. The essay itself is spoiled by the tantrum that someone had the temerity to move his favourite programme – an arguable decision perhaps, but a long leap from patronising bastardy.

It’s always good to read books and writers you disagree with, I would be the first to accept that. As a left-leaning, remain-voting, blog-writing southerner I need to better understand why people voted remain, (although I still struggle to improve on Stewart Lee’s take on the situation. I can’t link it here because it is nsfw but google it). Did I come through the ordeal of reading Patronising Bastards with a better understanding of that perspective? Sadly no, because the level of personal abuse clouded almost any effort at constructing a coherent argument. Which was a pity, because 17.2m people can’t all be racists?

Standard
Book review

Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne, 1873

Around the World in Eighty Days charts the adventures of Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout as they travel, well, you know what they get up to, and even if you didn’t the novel’s title would probably help you out! Set in the 1870’s, the time of its serial publication, the story takes its inspiration from the recent verneopening of the American transcontinental rail route, which theoretically allowed a journey around the world by land and sea in a time span that in earlier years would have been thought impossible. This is the central concept of the novel, which was obviously original and engaging in its day, although it hasn’t aged well.

Fogg is a caricature of the typically bloodless Englishman (there is a debate about the extent to which Verne established the various features of the Englishman abroad caricature, but that feels like a more academic exercise than I have the appetite for), only interested in his wager and his whist. He largely ignores all the countries he passes through. Passepartout on the other hand is fascinated by all he sees, and gives the reader some interesting insights into the countries they fleetingly visit. The pressures of keeping up to Fogg’s strict timetable give the novel a great pace, but means the countries fly by relentlessly.

I found Fogg’s lack of interest in his journey strangely off-putting – even when he meets an exotic Indian princess and rescues her from a grisly fate he treats her like someone he shares a commute with. Verne defines him largely by negatives:

Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas Fogg was a Londoner. He was never seen on ‘Change, nor at the Bank, nor in the counting-rooms of the “City”; no ships ever came into London docks of which he was the owner; he had no public employment; he had never been entered at any of the Inns of Court, either at the Temple, or Lincoln’s Inn, or Gray’s Inn; nor had his voice ever resounded in the Court of Chancery, or in the Exchequer, or the Queen’s Bench, or the Ecclesiastical Courts. He certainly was not a manufacturer; nor was he a merchant or a gentleman farmer. His name was strange to the scientific and learned societies, and he never was known to take part in the sage deliberations of the Royal Institution or the London Institution, the Artisan’s Association, or the Institution of Arts and Sciences.

Fogg is well-named, unremarkable in his appearance and his character. He possesses a self control that is alien to his European assistant and most of the people he meets on his journey. He is described as being:

“about forty years of age, with fine, handsome features, and a tall, well-shaped figure; his hair and whiskers were light, his forehead compact and unwrinkled, his face rather pale, his teeth magnificent. His countenance possessed in the highest degree what physiognomists call “repose in action,” a quality of those who act rather than talk. Calm and phlegmatic, with a clear eye … exactitude personified. … He was so exact that he was never in a hurry, was always ready, and was economical alike of his steps and his motions. He never took one step too many, and always went to his destination by the shortest cut; he made no superfluous gestures, and was never seen to be moved or agitated. He was the most deliberate person in the world, yet always reached his destination at the exact moment.

I am not sure if the reader is supposed to admire or warm to Fogg – we hope he wins his bet, although that’s never in much doubt, even at the close, but his romance with the Indian princess is a matter of supreme indifference.

Passepartout on the other hand is a larger-than-life comic character, constantly getting into schoolboyish ‘scrapes’, although the ease and regularity with which he is extricated from these situations gives the story a lack of authenticity. He introduces himself thus:

“Jean Passepartout, a surname which has clung to me because I have a natural aptness for going out of one business into another. I believe I’m honest, monsieur, but, to be outspoken, I’ve had several trades. I’ve been an itinerant singer, a circus-rider, when I used to vault like Leotard, and dance on a rope like Blondin. Then I got to be a professor of gymnastics, so as to make better use of my talents; and then I was a sergeant fireman at Paris, and assisted at many a big fire. But I quitted France five years ago, and, wishing to taste the sweets of domestic life, took service as a valet here in England.”

Fix, the bumbling policeman pursuing Fogg in the mistaken belief that he is a bank robber, is intended to provide further comedy as well as undermining Fogg’s attempts to keep to time, but we are never under any illusion that the outcome of the wager has been decided long ago. No matter what obstacles Verne throws in the way of the travellers, we always know they are going to waltz right round them and make it to the doorstep of the Reform Club with a minute to spare.

Around the World in Eighty Days is a confident expression of the wonders of the technological innovations of the 19th century and the way they were opening up the world to travellers. Instead of being scared by the inventions and machines (pace Wells) Verne revels in their powers. The novel is a celebration of the European spirit of conquest, exploration and innovation. Obviously we can now see the darker side to that spirit, but Verne sees things only from the perspective of his European characters and is blithely unaware that they are exploiting the people and places they visit. The novel also marks the beginning of long distance travel as something accessible to people other than explorers.  

Although Verne is usually seen as a science-fiction writer, this is a good example of an author writing outside his usual genre. There is a strong emphasis on the events and places in the novel being rooted in the actual, an attempt to make everything feel real and believable – hence for example the obsession with train timetables throughout the book. Now we can circle the globe in hours it all feels a bit quaint and ridiculous, and a wasted opportunity to see the world rather than just rush around it.

Standard