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Book review

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, by Carson McCullers,1951

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is a quirky, unusual novella set in the Southern USA in the (I am guessing here) 1930’s. Miss Amelia Evans runs a small store in a town in the middle of nowhere, topping up her income with sales from her whisky still. One day a stranger arrives in town, the catalyst for many a story. The visitor is a hunchback who claims to be Amelia’s distant Cousin Lymon. Acting out of character Amelia takes him into her home, and they form an unlikely friendship and partnership. Under Cousin Lymon’s influence, the shop transforms into the café of the story’s title.Sad cafe.jpg

Miss Amelia was once briefly married to Marvin Macy, a local troublemaker. The fact that the marriage never worked and was over in ten days was probably due to the fact that Amelia clearly never intended it to be consummated. Rejected, Macy reverted to type and was eventually locked away in the state penitentiary. All this happened long before Cousin Lymon arrived but inevitably Macy is eventually released, and returns to shatter the peaceful relationship between Amelia and Cousin Lymon. What makes matters worse is that Cousin Lymon transfers his affections to Macy, hero-worshipping him. Macy is everything he is not, both physically and mentally. Together they beat Amelia and trash her house and business. She is a fighter but is defeated by this betrayal and closes the cafe for good.

This is a tragic tale of unhappy love and rejection. In many ways it is a classic representation of the Southern Gothic style of writing, using macabre events and characters to comment on the history and experience of the American South.  Southern Gothic builds on the original European traditions of gothic writing, but moulds it to a specifically American purpose. The novel builds suspense slowly – much of the time Amelia and Macy are planning to fight one another, but the fight itself is delayed until the climax of the novel. The characters are grotesque – Cousin Lymon is a hunchback dwarf, Amelia is very tall and stronger than most men, and Macy is abusive and evil.

Decaying rural communities are the typical setting for Southern Gothic stories, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe certainly fulfils that criteria. Some of the more traditional features of Southern Gothic such as references to the South’s history of slavery and racism are only briefly referenced – Amelia cuts up Macy’s klan robes when he first leaves – but the motif of having a villain disguised as an innocent certainly features. Both Cousin Lymon and Macy try and reform and be kind to Amelia, but in the end both turn on her.

This was my first reading of a text by McCullers, even though I have been aware of her work for a long time. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is if nothing else a wonderful, evocative title, as is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, her other best known work. McCullers’s personal narrative is in many ways as tragic as her stories, and she is obviously an important figure in 20th century American literature. ‘Ballad’ is a relatively slight work; I am not sure it will linger long in the memory. The characters are distant and keep their thoughts and feelings closely locked away. At times they behave irrationally and while I can accept this reflects their troubled personalities it makes the narrative more a thing of curiosity than a story I could personally engage with. While her ability to evoke time and place is unquestionable, I am still unsure whether I will follow up this read with more McCullers for now.

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Book review

The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens, 1841

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The Old Curiosity Shop tells the story of Nell Trent, an orphan, cared for by  her grandfather in his antique (old curiosity) shop. Unfortunately the old man has a gambling addiction, which quickly drives them into poverty. He borrows money to fund his habit from the deliciously evil Daniel Quilp, a hunchbacked dwarf who has to be one of Dickens’ finest, funniest, most grotesque villains. Quilp repossess the shop and contents, leaving Nell and her grandfather on the streets. They embrace this as a freedom from oppression, and go on a long aimless journey that essentially lasts the rest of the novel. The shop is quietly forgotten as a motif or location in the novel – this must be one of Dickens’ most inappropriately named works!

Written as most if not all of Dickens’s novels were, in serial form, the structure of the novel is of necessity rambling, and therefore well suited to both the ‘on the road’ format of Nell and her grandfather’s journey, and the many other threads of the story that Dickens weaves into the rest of the narrative.

Probably the best known feature of this novel, and therefore not constituting a spoiler, is Nell’s eventual tragic death, succumbing to the mysterious wasting illness that ends so many young lives in nineteenth century novels. The story of people waiting at the New York docks and calling out to ask the sailors whether Nell lives is probably apocryphal, but it is a great story nonetheless, and demonstrates Dickens’ superstar status at the time. In fact Dickens signposts Nell’s fate throughout the novel, so much so that when one knows the outcome it seems a little heavy handed – lots of meditations on death, a preoccupation with the graves of younger children, several other deaths of children featuring, and so on – but Dickens obviously had to soften the blow. It was still a bold choice – he could easily have saved Nell and was under pressure to do so – but held his nerve. So perhaps not all that sentimental after all?

The real star of the show however is the demonic Quilp

Slight and ridiculous as the incident was, it made him appear such a little fiend, and withal such a keen and knowing one, that the old woman felt too much afraid of him to utter a single word, and suffered herself to be led with extraordinary politeness to the breakfast-table. Here he by no means diminished the impression he had just produced, for he ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the same time and with extraordinary greediness, drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork and spoon till they bent again, and in short performed so many horrifying and uncommon acts that the women were nearly frightened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a human creature.” 

Quilp is hunting for the runaways and at the same time pursuing a vendetta against Kit, their former assistant, who is saved by the evidence of Dick Swiveller and ‘the Marchioness’ – their relationship forming some of the most touching scenes in the novel.

Just a few perhaps somewhat random thoughts about the novel. First,  I don’t think it can be a coincidence that Dickens tells us that Nell is “not quite fourteen”. Juliet is almost exactly the same age, just two weeks short of fourteen, and Dickens, whether subconsciously or not, is inviting the reader to compare and link the two characters – Juliet also suffers a tragically early tragic death of course, another hint that this is to be Nell’s fate as well. But it also reminds the reader that Nell, while invariably described as a girl, is also seen by several men in the novel as on the cusp of becoming a young woman. She is spoken of at several points in sexualised terms. Early on her brother looks to marry her off to Richard Swiveller:

“You saw my sister Nell?’

‘What about her?’ returned Dick.

‘She has a pretty face, has she not?’

‘Why, certainly,’ replied Dick. ‘I must say for her that there’s not any very strong family likeness between her and you.’

‘Has she a pretty face,’ repeated his friend impatiently.

‘Yes,’ said Dick, ‘she has a pretty face, a very pretty face. What of that?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ returned his friend. ‘It’s very plain that the old man and I will remain at daggers drawn to the end of our lives, and that I have nothing to expect from him. You see that, I suppose?’

‘A bat might see that, with the sun shining,’ said Dick.

‘It’s equally plain that the money which the old flint—rot him—first taught me to expect that I should share with her at his death, will all be hers, is it not?’

‘I should said it was,’ replied Dick; ‘unless the way in which I put the case to him, made an impression. It may have done so. It was powerful, Fred. ‘Here is a jolly old grandfather’—that was strong, I thought—very friendly and natural. Did it strike you in that way?’

‘It didn’t strike him,’ returned the other, ‘so we needn’t discuss it. Now look here. Nell is nearly fourteen.’

‘Fine girl of her age, but small,’ observed Richard Swiveller parenthetically.

‘If I am to go on, be quiet for one minute,’ returned Trent, fretting at the slight interest the other appeared to take in the conversation. ‘Now I’m coming to the point.’

‘That’s right,’ said Dick.

‘The girl has strong affections, and brought up as she has been, may, at her age, be easily influenced and persuaded. If I take her in hand, I will be bound by a very little coaxing and threatening to bend her to my will. Not to beat about the bush (for the advantages of the scheme would take a week to tell) what’s to prevent your marrying her?’

To his credit, Dick is shocked

“‘And she “nearly fourteen”!’ cried Dick.”

Incidentally I love the way Dick is casually rude to Fred here.

The odious Quilp also plans to marry Nell when he has arranged an unfortunate accident for his first wife, and is constantly drawing attention to her attractiveness in a sexualised way:

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‘Such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud, neighbour,’ said Quilp, nursing his short leg, and making his eyes twinkle very much; ‘such a chubby, rosy, cosy, little Nell!’ . ‘so small, so compact, so beautifully modelled, so fair, with such blue veins and such a transparent skin, and such little feet, and such winning ways”

Dickens’s issues with much younger women have been well covered elsewhere. I appreciate that he is believed to have been working through his grief at the sudden death of his 17 year old sister-in-law when writing about Nell, but these scenes are unquestionably uncomfortable, and it is a relief when the focus moves off this aspect of the character.

Another significant feature of The Old Curiosity Shop that I noticed during this read is the frequency with which characters are anonymised. I don’t think we are ever told the name of Nell’s grandfather or great-uncle, who are known as the old man and the single man respectively. The Marchioness doesn’t know her own name, or possibly doesn’t have one, representing the depths of her abuse by the Brasses; the gentleman who offers Nell shelter at the end of the novel is referred to by all as ‘the bachelor’; even the man who offers Nell a place by his furnace is left unnamed. Why Dickens does this is unclear – in an industrial society people are often stripped of their identity as part of their reduction into the working components of their body – hence the way the term “hands” is used to describe factory workers for example – but some of the more affluent characters in the novel are treated in the same way.

Dickens is an extraordinary novelist, and despite his unquestioned status amongst English writers it could be argued he still doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Yes his characters can be two dimensional – but many are much more rounded and complex than this characterisation would suggest, Quilp being an excellent example. Yes his story lines can meander, but the way he controls his plots despite sometimes writing two novels for weekly publication at the same time is little short of amazing. He may have had issues with the sexualisation of younger women, but he created a huge range of believable and strong women characters. His writing can often be innovative and highly sophisticated, even though it was written for mass consumption. And not least, his support for the poor and down-trodden of Victorian England was authentic – he is the best advocate for social reform the working classes could have wanted:

“If they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found … and [those who rule] strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways where only Poverty may walk … In hollow voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years.”

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Book review

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, 1931

Lost world novels were very popular during the end of the major period of European colonisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. King Solomon’s Mines for example establishes many of the characteristics of the genre, and is sometimes considered the first lost-world narrative. European explorers set out to an unexplored part of the lovecraftworld, often protected by some great natural barrier which has previously prevented it from being explored, and discover a great civilisation which they set out to subdue. Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1918), are all classic examples of this genre. As time went on, unexplored lands were becoming hard to find, which perhaps explains why Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is set in one of the last remaining wildernesses on earth, the Antarctic.

It seems certain that Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written almost a century earlier than Lovecraft’s novella, was also an inspiration, hinting as it does at there being undiscovered mysteries at the South Pole, and is explicitly referenced in the later novel at several points.

Written ostensibly as a warning against a forthcoming Antarctic expedition, the first person narration by the geologist and explorer William Dyer, a professor at Arkham’s Miskatonic University, tells the story of his earlier disastrous expedition.

The novel adopts a traditional horror structure of hinting at unknown terrors to be revealed, and only describing them with reluctance after long delays. This is a conventional way of building suspense, but as a warning to the world not to disturb the Antarctic it is hardly convincing. The reader is always happy to suspend disbelief if given a decent enough reason to do so, but when the narrator behaves irrationally and unrealistically like this it undermines the credibility of the relationship between the reader and the text.

The details of the expedition are thoroughly and exhaustively set out, and initially all goes well. The narrator reminds us what we are told we already know, namely that the expedition’s advance party reported the discovery of the remains of prehistoric life-forms unknown to science, before being mysteriously wiped out.  Some form of dissection experiment has been done on one of the slaughtered explorers. Another member of the party is missing – did he go mad and massacre everyone one before heading out into the snow?

Dyer and a fellow explorer, Danforth, fly across the mountain range against which the advance party had pitched camp and discover a massive abandoned city, unlike anything found elsewhere on earth. They explore the city and find murals which tell the history of this lost civilisation. It is at this point that Lovecraft aficionados will start to sit up and listen, as more of the myth of ancient aliens with which Lovecraft is most closely associated is laid out. This city was built by the “Elder Things” in the very early days of the earth’s history, with the help of “shoggoths” — bio-engineered creatures they created to act as their slaves. It takes Dyer and Danforth a while to put the pieces together, and I suspect most readers will be there well ahead of them, but they finally work out that the slaughter at the camp was caused by the Elder Things who have somehow been reanimated. That’s not the end of their problems, because it seems that while the Elder Things killed out of curiosity, hence the attempts at dissection, the shoggoths have also survived and are getting peckish.

There are a number of problems with this novel, not least the structure which makes little sense in the context of it being presented as a warning to the world. There is no character development whatsoever, indeed almost no characterisation – all the explorers are diligent, good at their jobs, but completely anonymous and interchangeable. In terms of the plot the aliens are all there is – there’s no-one working secretly to undermine the expedition, sending secrets to an enemy nation keen to capture the alien technology. The aliens themselves are dull. Virtually all of the first half of the novel is a long set up for the visit to the lost city, where the interpretation of the murals tells the history of the Elder Ones. Devotees of all things Cthulhu will enjoy the canonical detail about the Elder Ones and their intergalactic struggles with the Mi-Go – but it left me cold. The horror element of the story is very limited in impact, and as an adventure story it also misses out – the first person narrative tells us that Dyer survives his ordeal, were that to be in any doubt. The novella is at least short, and I can now honestly say I have given Lovecraft the benefit of the doubt. This is a curiosity, nothing more, and unless you are into alternative mythologies, and I can’t imagine why you would be, I would give this a miss.

 

 

 

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Book review

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells, 1896

‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ is another example of the late Victorian fascination with the transformative powers of science. Written during an astonishingly productive period of creativity for Wells, when he also wrote the ‘Invisible Man‘, ‘War of the Worlds‘, and ‘The Time Machine‘, Wells draws heavily and widely on influences. Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ is an obvious influence for example for the scenes at the end of the novel when the protagonist returns to the UK and has trouble to adjusting back to modern life after spending so long alone with the beasts on Moreau’s island:

When I lived in London the horror was well-nigh insupportable. I could not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children... Particularly nauseous were the blank, expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone. And even it seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to wander alone,

This is a mood, however, that comes to me now, I thank God, more rarely. I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books,—bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men. I see few strangers, and have but a small household. My days I devote to reading and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. 

Wells is a great novelist of ideas, but he is also a wonderful and compelling moreaustoryteller. Here he builds the suspense and sense of horror slowly. The narrator, Edward Prendick, is rescued from a shipwreck, having survived in a small boat with two other passengers who at one point contemplate cannibalism, an early introduction to the idea of man as beast. His saviour is Montgomery,

“a youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist.…“Have some of this,” said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced. It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.”

Another hint of cannibalism here. Montgomery has a malformed assistant onboard, whose strangeness emerges slowly. At first it is his voice:

“I heard him in violent controversy with someone, who seemed to me to talk gibberish in response to him. The matter sounded as though it ended in blows, but in that I thought my ears were mistaken.”

Later Prendick sees him for the first time and is struck by his appearance. Something is obviously wrong:

“We left the cabin and found a man at the companion obstructing our way. He was standing on the ladder with his back to us, peering over the combing of the hatchway. He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders. He was dressed in dark-blue serge, and had peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair. I heard the unseen dogs growl furiously, and forthwith he ducked back,—coming into contact with the hand I put out to fend him off from myself. He turned with animal swiftness.”

Note how references to this man are always linked with the reactions of the caged dogs:

“In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth. His eyes were blood-shot at the edges, with scarcely a rim of white round the hazel pupils. There was a curious glow of excitement in his face.”

The narrator moves quickly from describing him as a man to a “creature”:

“I had paused half way through the hatchway, looking back, still astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature….The creature’s face was turned for one brief instant out of the dimness of the stern towards this illumination, and I saw that the eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light. I did not know then that a reddish luminosity, at least, is not uncommon in human eyes. The thing came to me as stark inhumanity. That black figure with its eyes of fire struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind.”

When they arrive at (and are dumped unceremoniously on) the mysterious island, they meet some more mysterious, strangely shaped people:

“a strange crew they were. I saw only their faces, yet there was something in their faces—I knew not what—that gave me a queer spasm of disgust…. They seemed to me then to be brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: . They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me,—faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen.” 

The astute reader will by now have come to understand that there is more to these strange people than meets the eye. But what? Prendick is not long on the island before he meets the mysterious Dr Moreau and discovers the purpose of his experiments:

“Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing so horrible in vivisection as to account for this secrecy; and by some odd leap in my thoughts the pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery’s attendant came back again before me with the sharpest definition…

What could it all mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?”

What indeed? At first Prendick concludes that the experiments are intended to turn men into beasts, and suspects he may be the next victim.

“I was convinced now, absolutely assured, that Moreau had been vivisecting a human being… These creatures I had seen were the victims of some hideous experiment. These sickening scoundrels had merely intended to…fall upon me with a fate more horrible than death,—with torture; and after torture the most hideous degradation it is possible to conceive,—to send me off a lost soul, a beast.”

Montgomery and Moreau are finally able to persuade him that the reverse is the case, and that while their experiments may seem cruel, they are being done in a noble cause. The ethics of vivisection are never far below the surface in this horror story, but it is more than a simple campaigning novel. Wells initiates a discussion about what it is to be a man, and his relationship with the rest of the  natural world, from which (as Darwin had only just explained) we come and with which we share a common ancestry.

That is not to say that Wells pulls his punches on the horror of vivisection:

“There was blood, I saw, in the sink,—brown, and some scarlet—and I smelt the peculiar smell of carbolic acid. Then through an open doorway beyond, in the dim light of the shadow, I saw something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged; and then blotting this out appeared the face of old Moreau, white and terrible.”

Wells invites the reader to draw comparison between Moreau’s unnatural man-beasts, and the plight of the working man in Victorian industrial cities.

I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman’s vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.

This needs care – Wells is not suggesting that the working classes are beast-like, more that they have been treated as beasts of burden, and that doing so constantly might trigger the violent outbursts of anger and rejection of the law that Moreau’s man-beasts finally enjoy. The treatment of the animals on Moreau’s island can also be read as a critique of colonialism – Prendick initially assumes the man-beasts are ‘natives’ of some kind, and explains away their brutish appearance on this basis. European settlers and traders often treated indigenous people as animals, and even conducted social experiments aimed at ‘civilising’ them in the way Moreau does his beasts.

To finish, just a couple of other points: first, it is well known that Wells was politically progressive, and considered himself a socialist. There is a fleeting reminder of this when the narrator half-quotes Shelley’s ‘Masque of Anarchy’, where the implied reference to ‘rising like lions’ is particularly apposite:

“You who listen,” I cried, pointing now to Moreau and shouting past him to the Beast Men,—“You who listen! Do you not see these men still fear you, go in dread of you? Why, then, do you fear them? You are many—”

Second, consider these laws the animals are taught to maintain their obedience:

“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

I had never spotted before, nor seen it mentioned, but Orwell clearly drew inspiration from Wells here for his laws of animalism in ‘Animal Farm‘.

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Book review

Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E M Forster, 1905

I first read Forster’s Where Angels forty years ago as one of my ‘O’ level texts. It was interesting to reflect on what I remembered and what had not survived the loss of brain cells over the years. The basic plot outline was still there, although the ending came as a pretty unpleasant surprise. Strangely one sentence about the novel’s protagonist, Philip, one of the fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, remained crystal clear:

“He might be a puppet’s puppet, but he knew exactly the disposition of the strings”.

This was the type of quote that we all were taught to underline and memorise, as a key to understanding Philip’s character. Looking back I am not so sure it works that way, although certainly Forster suggests as much by the heavy handed language (in what way is Philip a puppet’s puppet – who is the puppet who is controlling him – his mother? Hardly a puppet surely, more a very headstrong woman, another fool rushing in without thought or consideration. And ‘he knew exactly’ rather than ‘he knew the exact’ is a clumsy formulation which again serves to make the sentence stand out.)

‘Where Angels’ is a slight novel, chosen I suspect as an ‘O’ level text because of its length rather than any particular intrinsic literary value or its interest to teenagers. Lilia Herriton is widowed in her early thirties, and undertakes a Grand Tour of Italy at the suggestion of her in-laws, who appear keen to get rid of her for a while, despite the fact that she leaves behind a young daughter, Irma. Her travelling companion, Caroline Abbott, a younger single woman, is intended to act as a chaperone, but fails miserably to prevent Lilia from falling in love with and marrying a much younger Italian man, Gino. The Herriton’s suspect Gino is a Mediterranean cad – his father is a dentist for goodness sake!

“A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.” 

(I recognise, of course, that this over-the-top reaction is supposed to be funny, pricking Philip’s pomposity. I am not sure it is though.)

Arguably this is the first of several instances of fools rushing in, but it is quickly followed as Lilia’s brother-in-law Philip hurries to Italy to try to prevent the marriage, arriving too late and leaving ineffectually empty-handed. Philip feels partly responsible for this inappropriate marriage – he was very enthusiastic about the idea of Lilia going on an Italian tour, being something of a connoisseur of all things Italian.

Lilia finds life in Italy much less romantic and interesting than she anticipated – Gino is a stereotypically unfaithful Latin lover, and she is effectively confined to her house in a small provincial town. Forster sometimes uses deus ex machina techniques such as a sudden death to inject drama to his novels, and he succumbs to this plot device again when Lilia dies in childbirth. This felt as if Forster was laboriously setting up the novel’s denouement, getting his pieces in play for the final scene, rather than an integral part of the narrative, and her death is announced casually. The reaction back in England is at first to ignore the new born (who is not a blood relative of the Herritons). Quixotically they change their minds – or more specifically Mrs Herriton, the family matriarch, changes her mind – when she hears that Caroline has decided to go back to Italy to ‘save’ the child from the horror of being brought up motherless, and worse, Italian. Philip follows Caroline accompanied by his scary sister Harriet aiming to gazump Caroline and effectively buy the baby from Gino.

Gino is not interested in selling his son, of course and is planning to remarry to provide him with a mother. In a melodramatic finale Harriet kidnaps the baby and flees for the coast. Racing to meet the train, their coach crashes and the baby is killed. The aftermath of the crash is painful to all. Philip eventually realises that he is in love with Caroline but she is still in love with Gino, having been so all along.

There is a soap opera element to the repeated overnight journeys to Italy and back, the sudden deaths and unsuitable and unrequited romances. In an otherwise positive essay for the Guardian back in 2002, Zadie Smith wrote “there is a lot in Forster that fails, is both cloying and banal” – which made me wonder what she would have said if she really didn’t like his work. I quote her here because this phrase resonated with me – there is a lot in Where Angels that doesn’t work, is sentimental, over-written and dull. When it was first published over 100 years ago the Guardian then called it (again in another not altogether hostile review) “a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy.” The two elements, humour and tragedy, sit uncomfortably together – the novel is neither a gentle comedy about silly English people and their class distinctions, nor a tragedy about how good intentions can go wrong. Ultimately I found it melodramatic and not in a good way.

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Book review

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005

Wow. Just wow.

I am a bit embarrassed that I have only now just got round to reading what must be one of the most powerful novels written this century. I can completely see why Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. In terms of subtlety, control and lightness of touch this novel ranks with Nabokov at his best.never

It’s also an extraordinarily difficult book to review without spoilers, and while my approach to spoilers in the past has been robust if not cavalier, here’s where I draw the line – because I can’t tell you (assuming you don’t know already of course) the central idea of this novel without undermining the long slow reveal which is a key part of the narrative structure.

I would hate you to think this all means that this is a ‘difficult’ novel. Part of Ishiguro’s genius is that it is deceptively simple. It is written in the form of the first person memoir by Kathy H, a ‘carer’. She describes a childhood spent at Hailsham, a boarding school somewhere in England. At first Kathy’s memories of school are unremarkable – this could easily be a traditional school story, all hockey sticks and midnight feasts, crushes on teachers and silly games. But the text is carefully sprinkled with suggestions that Hailsham is not your typical boarding school. Although the text opens with a stark sentence “England, 1990s” this is deceptive – and at the same time not, in that apart from the one key difference, this is a remarkably familiar, almost mundane world of bus shelters, offices, cassette tapes and cafes.

This is an incredibly thoughtful meditation on childhood and the mysteries of life. If that sounds pompous then I apologise because it is anything but. If you don’t want spoilers then stop here, because I find I can’t continue without commenting on the treatment of the novel’s major themes. The children at Hailsham and elsewhere are, we eventually discover, clones, bred for their organs, which are slowly harvested from them once they reach maturity. The moment when we find this out is a shocking moment of realisation – all of a sudden the references to caring, donating and ‘completing’ come into focus.

I doubt I am alone in wondering why the clones don’t reject the role in life set out for them as ‘donors’ and rebel, or just run away. The children’s pilgrimage to see a boat washes up on the Norfolk shoreline perhaps hints at their desire to escape their preordained fate. But I came to realise this would be missing the point. When the children are growing up at Hailsham they are gradually introduced to the concept that they will have their organs harvested and then eventually, after two, three or four operations, die. Dying is referred to as “completing”. They grow up understanding this is their fate and are taught not to question it. But don’t we all? We are all told about death, but we are also lied to about it. I don’t often quote the Daily Telegraph, but their reviewer put it really well – ”

‘Gradually, it dawns on the reader that Never Let Me Go is a parable about mortality. The horribly indoctrinated voices of the Hailsham students who tell each other pathetic little stories to ward off the grisly truth about the future – they belong to us; we’ve been told that we’re all going to die, but we’ve not really understood.”

Or as the narrator Kathy puts it

“What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”

We do indeed all ‘complete’, and few of us feel we have had enough time.

There’s obviously another perfectly valid reading of this novel which accepts this point – we all die – but goes on to make the point that we don’t all die by having our organs harvested and that society treats some people differently from others. The clones in the novel are treated by their non-clone guardians as little more than soulless meat. Hailsham, we are told, is a progressive school (farm) where the children (clones) are treated humanely, but we are also told that the movement to improve conditions for clones has declined and that they are now treated badly. One can only imagine what that means. This is surely a parable for the way people who we perceive as different, whether by race, gender, disability or religion are treated in some societies, dehumanised, ostracised, and even butchered. Or as Kathy puts it:

Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.” So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.” 

I feel I have only scratched the surface of this wonderful, powerful, heartbreaking novel, which I am sure I will return to one day. Like all great books it can only be read for the first time once – after you know Hailsham’s dark secret you can never un-know it – but this is so much more than a mystery novel. As a masterpiece of controlled writing and construction I can’t recall having read anything like it for a very long time.

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Book review

Pyramids, (Discworld 7) by Terry Pratchett, 1989

As an experiment I tried crowd-sourcing this review. I joined a Terry Pratchett appreciation group on Facebook, and posted the following message:pyramids-cover

Hi all. Quick question – what do people think of ‘Pyramids’? I am writing a review and my initial impression is that it is one of STP’s less successful books in the series, but struggling to pinpoint why. There’s some great lines and ideas, but it just doesn’t take off. What do people think?

I received over 100 replies (and counting) which was amazing – this is obviously a really vibrant online community. Given this was a group for fans of all-thing Discworld, it is hardly surprising that most of the comments were along the lines of “amazing” and “wonderful”. At the same time it’s hardly in the spirit of crowd-sourcing to only selection for quotation those comments I agreed with – I may have well just written my own review in the first place!

Quick plot summary for context – Pteppic, the crown prince of Djelibeybi (one of the better jokes in the book) is a trainee at the Assassins’ Guild in Ankh-Morpork. On the death of his father he returns home to become king, and oversee the construction of his father’s tomb, the biggest pyramid ever built. it’s not all fun as a living god however – the high priest Dios acts as voice of the king, and doesn’t allow Pteppic to make any decisions for himself.

The ancestral pyramids covering most of the country are used to control time in the kingdom, apparently, and in a scene that you just have to accept, the new pyramid, being built with magic, is so large that it causes some kind of space/time anomaly. Djelebeybi rotates out of alignment with the rest of the world by ninety degrees. Pteppic and his handmaiden Ptraci travel to neighbouring Ephebe to try and find a way of recovering the kingdom, while back in Djelibeybi the Old Gods and all the late kings come back to life, causing chaos. With the help of a mathematically advanced camel, Pteppic manages to put things back to right and all is well with the Disc.

So back to these readers’ comments. Positive comments first. There is a consensus here that the jokes really work, the ideas are great and the characters are believable and interesting. Lots of people tried to explain really engaged with the question I posed about my doubts about the novel (which was really kind actually) which mainly revolved around it being one of the few standalone novels, in a setting which STP didn’t return to. No-one said I was wrong – this isn’t that kind of community.

I really liked it. But I think the books with recurring characters will always have an edge as favourites

Love it. Sometimes it has to do with the mood you are in. Try again in a year.

It’s better on the second read through. Not his best, but not bad by any stretch.

I think as a stand alone discworld novel its great, like Reaper Man or Small Gods. However because the witches, the Watch (my personal favourite) or Rincewind appear in multiple books you have more time to get to know them and so you care more about them. Just a hypothesis based on opinion though

Love the book. Possible the reason it “less successful” is that there is not seque, As with Vimes or the witches books. As a stand allow or is as strong as any.

I love it. Its take on organized religion and the nature of belief is spot on.

I really loved it, one of my favourites. Teppic is a great characters and Dios is one of STP’s best written antagonists in my opinion, even if his name is a little on-the-nose.

I love it. That opening sequence (the assassin exam) is exquisite.

I really like it. One issue for me as a fan is that I like the relationship that develops as characters mature through the cannon. As a stand alone book it feels more superficial because of the need to establish the characters.

One of my favourites actually. Of course we all have different tastes and they often change over time.

It’s one of my favourites, possibly because it is one of the first times the theology of the disc becomes explicit.

One of if not my favourite. love the detail and so many jokes

One of my favourites, it was the second I read after small Gods. I think the standalones are a good entry point. And a bit of religion and mythic philosophy were very appealing to teenage me

Loved the school stuff! One of my favourite passages of any discworld books 👍

You Bastard (the camel) is one of my favourite characters.

These were the comments that were generally negative, and tried to explain why:

I agree, and I blame inferior characterization. Ptepppic is no Moist von Lipwick, Ptraci is no AdoraBelle, Dios is no Vorbis. Hence their verbal and dramatic interactions don’t stand up to comparison with later novels. Nonetheless, I re-read it … and my initial dislike lessened. A not-quite-so-good Pratchett novel is better than anything else.

I have just finished rereading this in my chronological reread, and I agree that it’s not his best. It has some good ideas, but for some reason the whole just doesn’t gel. It feels like he raced through it to meet a deadline. It especially suffers in comparison to Guards! Guards! which comes after it.

They don’t quite work together cohesively as a theme, I think. The assassins are great, the camels are great, Ephebe is great, all the Djelibeybi jokes are great… But nothing really ties them together thematically except the plot.

One of my least favourites. Didn’t find myself rooting for the characters. Didn’t understand what was going on a lot of the time.

Just rereading and think it’s the lack of familiar characters. It makes it hard to latch on to.

My “least favourites” tend to be the early ones where the plot and characters are mostly there to serve the jokes. I think Pyramids qualifies. At times, it’s like the really good pun or silly name is hard-elbowing its way past everything else.

It’s not one of my favourites but I do like it a fair bit. It’s one of the few of his books that doesn’t really flow as a whole story and feels a bit more like the storyline could have been created by another author.

Interesting that you asked. It was my 7th or 8th one from the series and I thought it was so boring and dumb I stopped reading his books for a few years. Would not recommend it.

For me, it is one of my least favourites. Although I do like Dios as a character, the book seems to be either a bit too stretched, as in thin in the middle, the beginning and the end are fun and go along at a decent pace, but the middle just loses something for me. I trend to have the same reaction to small gods and moving pictures however.

Not my favourite. I think it is because there isn’t a character I really care about.

There are some really good points here – even STP not at his best is still worth reading – but what is interesting is that people seemed to agree that the lack of familiar characters and settings – or characters that were to go on to become familiar – was an issue.

My sneaking suspicion is that Sir Terry would have happily accepted that this wasn’t his finest hour, which is why he never returned to these characters. It’s not that its a dud, it’s just not quite at the same standard as most of his other work. There are some jumps in the logic of the story where the reader just has to do a little too much work. But I would also agree with many commentators that the Assassins’ Guild examination chapter is worth the purchase price of the novel on its own.

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Book review

Howards End, by E M Forster 1910

howards end

Set in Edwardian England at the beginning of the 20th century, during that brief but now seen as idyllic decade when the full horrors of the twentieth century were yet to emerge, ‘Howards End’ concerns three families: the Wilcoxes, the Anglo-German Schlegels, and the Basts. Each family is very precisely defined in terms of their class. The Wilcoxes are the more prosperous family, but their money derives from business rather than inheritance. Mrs Wilcox is differentiated from the rest of her family by her inheritance of the family home, the ‘Howards End’ of the novel’s title. The Wilcoxes are determinedly conservative and patriarchal, fiercely rejecting women’s suffrage and ordering their servants around brusquely. The Schlegels sisters, Margaret and Helen, are more urban and liberal, interested in the arts and living on inherited money without having to work for a living. The Basts are working class, and while Leonard is an insurance clerk he has aspirations for a life of culture. His wife appears only briefly in the novel, but plays a crucial part in one of its moment of melodrama.

After the Schlegels and Wilcoxes meet on holiday in Germany, Helen visits the Wilcoxes at their country home, (Howards End), where the novel opens. Impetuously she becomes engaged to the younger son, Paul, although they both almost immediately realise this has been a silly mistake, and call the whole thing off. The Wilcoxes move to London, abandoning Howards End until the end of the novel, into an apartment close to the Schlegels’ home. Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox become unlikely friends, but this friendship is cut short by Mrs Wilcox’s unexpected death. On her deathbed she bequeaths Howards End to Margaret but the bequest is informal and Margaret does not become aware of it until many years later. The Wilcox’s burn the note and agree never to speak of it, considering it a betrayal.

In a parallel plot line, the Schlegel sisters meet Leonard Bast at a concert. Leonard is an impoverished clerk about to marry a much older woman. Leonard yearns for a life of culture and the arts. Mr Wilcox warns the sisters that the insurance Leonard works for is likely to go bust – they in turn warn Leonard, who quits his job for something less well paid, only for that advice to turn out to be completely wrong.

Another time jump, and Henry Wilcox, the family patriarch and widower, and Margaret (the older Schlegel sister) become friends. Unsuited for the life of a bachelor, Henry proposes to Margaret. This is a marriage of opposites, and it is uncomfortable to a modern reader to see Margaret bullied into submission by her boorish husband, devoid as their relationship is of any outward sign of affection or compatibility. (In a horrible parody of affection, Henry refers to Margaret as “it” – “What a practical little woman it is! What’s it been reading” (chapter 31). Henry’s children are unhappy with this marriage – Margaret is an outsider, and their opposition is focussed on a suspicion that this is a long term plan to claim her rights to Howards End.

The melodrama really starts in earnest at the fateful wedding of one of Mr Wilcox’s children, Evie, in Shropshire. Distressed by finding the Bast’s living in poverty, and blaming Mr Wilcox for their situation, she bizarrely drags them to Shropshire to confront him. Unsurprisingly that doesn’t go well – in fact it goes horribly wrong, and from this point the events of the novel spiral badly out of control.

Forster is usually considered a liberal novelist, a defender of the arts and liberal values against the barbarism of the Wilcoxes and their ilk. Certainly the Schlegels are the more sympathetic personalities in the novel, but the whole thrust of the narrative is an attempt to reconcile the different aspects of the national character, bridging the gap between progressive and conservative, rich and poor, rural and urban – all of which is brought together in the novel’s central location, Howards End, and the very modern blended family that eventually comes to live there.

‘Howards End’ is usually considered a “state of the nation” novel, in which the central theme concerns how the country is emerging from the Victorian period to face the challenges of the twentieth century. In this reading the Wilcoxes can be seen as the confident, bullying imperialist, always ordering the working classes about. Mrs Wilcox represents the aristocracy, unifying the disparate elements of the novel through her house, ‘Howards End’. The Schlegels are the cultural life of the country, and Leonard Bast the apologetic and slightly pathetic representative of the working class. I’ve picked out a few quotes which illustrate this discussion of class:

“Dear Margaret, do come into the library and shut the door. Your maids are dusting the banisters”. (Chapter 2)

This is Mrs Munt, the sisters’ aunt, speaking. There are a number of things that jumped out at me when reading this sentence. First, they have a library. This is a novel in which lots of contrasting homes feature, and this is one of the central locations. The dimensions of the Schlegel’s London home in Wickham Place (a fleeting reference to Austen perhaps?) are never given. But it must be a decent size to have a library. Second – and this point is made several times elsewhere in the novel – it is not the done thing to speak of private or personal matters in front of staff. But third, and possibly most noticeably, the sisters have at least two, and possibly more, maids. Servants feature extensively in ‘Howards End’, although they are rarely given a voice (I think one of the chauffeurs might have a line or two) but essentially they are a servile underclass treated as disposable items of equipment. There is a passing indication that employing and retaining servants is something that is becoming increasingly hard in Edwardian England, and of course that situation was to get markedly worse during and after the Great War, but there is a strong line linking the maids, valets and butlers of Austen’s Regency novels and the Schlegel’s and Wilcox’s domestics nearly 100 years later.

“’Esprit de classe’…was strong in Mrs Munt. She sat quivering while a member of the lower orders deposited a metal funnel, a saucepan, and a garden squirt beside the roll of oilcloth.”

(Chapter 3)

Mrs Munt is essentially comic relief in this novel, and we are presumably intended to find her sense of outrage at the way she is being treated, her silent impotence, amusing. There certainly is something comic in the list of miscellaneous objects being loaded in to the car from the ironmongers – but class and class instincts are never far below the surface in ‘Howards End’. Here the shop-keeper is a representative of the lower orders, in front of whom class spirit dictates that emotions, particularly those of women, must be strictly checked.

“She (Mrs Wilcox) approached just as Helen’s letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her – that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy.” (Chapter 3).

Forster returns to the issue of class, claiming here that aristocracy is ‘the instinctive wisdom of the past’ – which is why the country and its assets should be left in the hands of the upper classes, not people with pretensions above their stations such as Leonard Bast. This is profoundly conservative perspective, and there is little reason to believe it is not the author’s as well as the narrator’s. incidentally, that wisp of hay in Mrs Wilcox’s hands makes a reappearance almost 300 pages later in chapter 43, as Margaret considers the aftermath of the confrontation at Howards End between Charles Wilcox and Leonard. “Life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky; life was a house, death a wisp of hay”. This echo from the novel’s opening to its conclusion can’t be an accident (death is not, after all, a wisp of hay) and I suspect is Forster’s way of linking the opening scenes at Howards End  with the novel’s conclusion.

At Mrs Wilcox’s funeral the narrator describes a woodcutter high in a tree, looking down at the ceremony. “With a grunt he descended, his thoughts no longer on death, but on love, for he was mating”. I can’t recall any ever reading about someone engaged in an ongoing sexual relationship – which is what Forster means – described in this way. It is coarse and animalistic – it implies that is all he is doing, copulating, rather than being in love. Without question he would not describe the relationships between the other characters in the novel in this way. The conception of Helen’s baby is virtually immaculate by comparison. Put simply, this is the language of class hatred. Is this the narrator who finds working class people no better than animals, or is it Forster? I could scour Forster’s diaries and correspondence to try and identify his personal opinions on class and sexual relationships, but that wouldn’t really answer the question. Certainly the perspective is consistent with the narrator’s other comments on class, such as the equally brutal and faintly ludicrous “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.” (Chapter 6)

There’s much to enjoy in ‘Howards End’. It is a thoughtful novel of ideas. At times the writing goes over the top, and the narrator becomes more of a preacher, such as here:

“Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of a man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.”

I am afraid this means very little to me, and I don’t read novels for this level of patrician pomposity. But if you skim over these paragraphs, and I recognise you really shouldn’t have to, then what remains is an important novel that bridges the gap between the authors of the Victorian era and the modernist writers of the twentieth century.

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Book review

Early Riser, by Jasper Fforde, 2018

This is a really welcome return to writing ffor Fforde after a ffour year hiatus. (sorry).

I am guessing, but my suspicion is that his inspiration for this novel was the question “What if the last Ice Age had not finished when it did?” We know that human evolution – or probably more accurately the development of human civilisation – was profoundly affected by the most recent Ice Age. It can’t be a coincidence that the glaciers began to retreat around 11,700 years ago, and we can start to trace the rise of civilisation as we know it from around 10,000 years ago. But what if the ice had never gone away – what would human civilisation look like?fforde

Fforde builds his world around this premise, or something very similar to it. In this chilly world humans hibernate, and it is part of his slow reveal technique that it is not until around 250 pages in that we discover what we should have probably already worked out, that humans have retained body hair more akin to our monkey cousins than our current-day down.

This world is shown through the eyes of Charlie Worthing, a trainee Night Consul. The Night Consuls are a police force who maintain order while 99% of the population sleep through the winter, protecting the sleeping from the Villains and others who choose not to hibernate. Charlie is very much the innocent abroad, who tries to do the right thing but is constantly stumbling into situations where his presence is at best a complicating factor.

In this alternative world, death during the winter is a frequent occurrence, not just for the Night Consuls. Go to sleep thin and you don’t wake up. The drugs people take to stop calorie sapping dreams can also take their toll, leaving some survivors as little more than brain dead and very hungry zombies. Charlie’s first job as a consul is to escort one such walker to a research facility, and when his companion is stolen, Charlie goes in pursuit, setting off a chain of events that cause mayhem in this sector of snow-bound Wales.

Fforde’s world building is wonderful – he has really given a huge amount of thought to what life in his world would be like. It is in many ways a quite sinister dystopia – fertility rights are traded down generations for example. He has also created a detailed vision of what dream manipulation might look like. As a detective story the novel is slightly less successful – Charlie is a hapless hero who is always on the spot when someone else is blown away by one of the freaky new percussive weapons people have, or predated by one of the WinterVolk – semi-mythological creatures who people the winters, along with the surviving mega-fauna such as mammoths. Somehow he always survives, and for me this pattern became a little predictable – Charlie and A.N.Other character set out to explore mysterious scenario a, b, or c, peril threatens and A.N.Other is blasted to kingdom-come with Charlie watching open-mouthed alongside them.

The novel is chock-full of in-jokes and contemporary references, (and not-so contemporary references – Rick Astley features, for example) and the winter-world  is very recognisable, even if given a tweak. There is a Jane Bond film franchise, with one controversial male casting. References to the Welsh setting and the class war with the English give the novel a very specific set of cultural references that may not travel well – the novel is not yet published in the US, and it will be interesting to see how it is received there.

Quibbles aside, it is fantastic to have Fforde back. I don’t know if Charlie Worthing will be appearing in any sequels – I have a hunch not – but anything he writes is definitely worth reading. Highly recommended. If you haven’t read Fforde before then I also cannot recommend ‘The Eyre Affair’ highly enough – it is brilliant.

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Book review

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1837

When I finish reading a text I will often consult the internet for some perspective – reviews, commentary, background, etc. My reading about ‘The Fall of the House of Usher‘ was largely un-illuminating – lots of people writing about how wonderful the story is – gothic, macabre, atmospheric are the terms most often used – but no-one able to clearly articulate why. It seems either you ‘get’ Poe or you don’t, and so far I don’t.usher

Here, for example, is some commentary in the journal of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore (and let’s not pass too quickly over the fact that there is an Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore) written by someone from the Tennessee Technological University (which sounds a really august centre of learning):

“Many readers consider Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ to be one of the greatest short stories in all of world literature”.

Do they, really? I can’t find any evidence for that, and none is cited, which for an academic publication is disappointing. The writer continues:

“Few would disagree, at least, that it is one of Poe’s most popular and justifiably famous works.”

If this hyperbole were a one-off then I would be unjustified in quoting it, but that is far from the case – the reviewers on Goodreads, Amazon/com and Amazon.uk are near unanimous that Poe is a genius (which I am sure explains the whole marrying your 13 year old cousin thing) and that his story-telling and prose is outstanding. The editor of the Penguin Classics edition, David Galloway, describes ‘The Fall‘ as “one of Poe’s finest tales ….whose richness and totality of effect entitles it to unquestioned place among the short-fiction masterpieces of all time. Perhaps no other single short story has exerted such profound influences on other artists as Poe’s ‘Germanic’ tale“. Unquestioned place? Not ‘an unquestioned place’ – has the author’s gothic way of expressing himself transferred itself to the editor?

So what is it I am missing? I decided to give ‘The Fall‘ a further look following this research – surely the story has more to offer than I originally thought?

“During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher”. 

Poe establishes his themes and techniques as soon as possible – he piles up the adjectives, alliteratively where possible, keeps on adding subordinate clauses one after the other, and is slow to tell the reader what is going on, even though the tale is told in the past tense (or more strictly the pluperfect – “I had been passing alone”). This is almost a prose poem, and makes it quite easy to copy and/or parody. Indeed, so over the top is Poe’s writing that it can easily be read as self-parody.

Poe also establishes early on that the phrase “The House of Usher” means both the family, and their home. Thus the term “fall” used in the story’s title tells us that both the house and the family are to meet their end in the course of the tale. The description of a “fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag fashion” together with a long description of the decayed fabric of the house, suggests a likely fate for both the house and the family. The additional suggestion a little later that the house has gained a form of sentience from the family, builds even closer links between the two.

Switching to the present tense, to give a more immediate sense to the narrative, the narrator describes his host, Roderick Usher, clearly suffering from a psychological illness of an undefined nature – he is pale and lethargic, suffering from nerves and ‘fear’. His sister, Madeline, has a mysterious sickness that doctors cannot treat. The narrator tries to cheer Roderick up – he listens to him play the guitar, and reads him stories, but without effect.

“I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of the performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. 

It would be ridiculous to hold Poe to any normal standard of coherence or clarity in what is a tale of the supernatural, but his characters’ behaviour is still puzzling. The Lady Madeline passes away from her mysterious illness, and Roderick announces that he plans to inter her body in one of the vaults within the main family house, rather than the nearby burial grounds. The reasons given are, as always, ambiguous and vaguely sinister. The vault is lined with metal walls and a heavy iron door. Our last look at the corpse sees that she has “a faint blush upon the bosom and face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death.”

Any reader versed in the conventions of the gothic will be able to fill in the rest of the narrative without assistance from the author (or reviewer).

I could continue to delve into the depths of this narrative to try and find some additional value, but there comes a point when you just have to accept that certain styles of writing are just not to your taste. If you enjoy overblown, over the top, over-written gothic horror then this will be your cup of tea. But don’t be disappointed if you don’t find it the masterpiece that some believe it to be.

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