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Book review

Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, 1962

I am trying to work out if this is a Young Adult book or not, and would appreciate any advice anyone can offer. Because if it is I clearly shouldn’t have read it. Only kidding of course – just pointing out that putting labels on novels is sometimes not helpful.

‘Something Wicked This Way Comes‘ (and what a wonderful title by the way) tells the dark, macabre story of Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, two appropriately nameBradburyd 13 year old small-town American boys, and their visits to ‘Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show’, a distinctly 1950’s American carnival.  Sneaking into the carnival after it closes, they witness the proprietors using a spectral merry-go-round with supernatural powers, specifically the ability to age, or reduce the age of, anyone who rides it. Discovered, they are pursued by the carnival owners and their enslaved exhibits (the Dust Witch, the Skeleton, the Dwarf, and Mr Electrico). The rest of the novel tells the story of their pursuit and their struggles with the malevolent carnival characters.

There are a number of themes here that have gone on to become standard features of gothic horror novels. I can’t be sure to what extent Bradbury  simply developed these traditions, or originated them, but he without doubt had a significant influence on writers such as Stephen King, (who wrote his own coming of age novel, Stand by Me) and Neil Gaiman, both of whom have acknowledged their debt to Bradbury. Characters bewitched into different, powerless, forms appear here, as does the idea of a community that mysteriously reappears every generation, once every thirty years. The novel even has the idea of a library as a supposedly safe space from which a fight-back against the forces of the night can be launched (Buffy, anyone?).

Carnivals are inherently spooky, particularly those with freak-shows. They come to life at night, appear overnight and disappear as quickly. They are not the kind of place you want to get lost in. Bradbury uses this carnival as a potent symbol of sin and evil – “(it) survives living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets“(chapter 40).

The ‘however’ you have been expecting is now overdue. The element of genuine suspense, the belief that Will and Jim might actually come to harm, is missing. The dust-witch is killed with a smile, and laughter is used to make the night recede. Evil melts away in the face of a chuckle. The freaks and their puppet masters are conquered far too easily. The blurb to this edition quotes a Washington Post review which refers to this text as a “timeless rite of passage” novel. More specifically it is a coming of age story – in the course of the few hours span of the novel, Jim and Will quite literally grow up, taking an inadvertent circuit on the time-travelling merry go round. Which brings us back to the Young Adult question. Evil that is defeated without too much stress, and teenagers growing up – these are classic ingredients of the YA genre. If further proof were needed, the film of the book was made by Disney! But I still liked it.

 

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Book review

Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson, 1748 – Volume 2

Volume 2 of ‘Clarissa’ is extraordinarily like volume 1 – Clarissa’s family send various people to try to persuade her to comply with their wishes, she in reply explains her adamantine opposition to Mr Solmes. Lovelace, the libertine suitor who her family have rejected, lurks in the background, waiting for his opportunity. Every word is recorded faithfully for Miss Howes, Clarissa’s faithful friend, who in return occasionally chips in with some moderately helpful advice. Miss Howes’ suitor Mr Hickman appears briefly, but is dismissed primarily as a nuisance to be dealt with once the main drama is concluded.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion at times that Clarissa is enjoying being the centre of attention, even though the threat she is living under is real enough. She generates vast volumes of letters, often several in one day, but her practical problems of getting these to Miss Howes – there is some clumsy business with a loose brick in the garden wall – are overlooked. Email would have been so convenient to imprisoned young women in the eighteenth century!

With so little ground to cover, and so many pages to fill, Richardson inevitably gets long-winded, as in this extract from letter 43, which for me is also an example of pretty clumsy writing

“If the thing requested be of greater consequence, or even of equal, to the person sought to, and it were, as the old phrase has it, to take a thorn out of one’s friend’s foot to put in into one’s own, something might be said— nay, it would be, I will venture to say, a selfish thing in us to ask a favour of a friend which would subject that friend to the same or equal inconvenience as that from which we wanted to be relieved, the requested would, in this case, teach his friend, by his own selfish example, with much better reason, to deny him, and despise a friendship so merely nominal.”

Moments of actual activity, rather than debate about a daughter’s duties, are rare, and the format Richardson has adopted makes it impossible for him to describe any such action when it does happen other than in retrospect. He increasingly resorts to having people scribble notes as they wait for someone to arrive, and then breathlessly report on what has happened, with the events themselves being the one time the screen goes blank. The constraints of the format occasionally lead to Richardson breaking his own rules – footnotes begin to appear from the anonymous editor of the correspondence, pointing out various contradictions in the characters’ behaviour. Using correspondence allows the author to give us directly and immediately the character’s thoughts and feelings, but the other shortcomings of the form are becoming more obvious as the novel progresses.

Despite being her intimate correspondence, Clarissa rarely tells us what she is really feeling – she instead spends a huge amount of time setting out what she believes she ought to think and feel. Which is why her dream recounted in letter 34, when the prospect of a forced marriage with Solmes seems imminent, is revealing:

‘Methought my brother, my uncle Antony, and Mr. Solmes, had formed a plot to destroy Mr. Lovelace; who discovering it, and believing I had a hand in it, turned all his rage against me. I thought he made them all fly to foreign parts upon it; and afterwards seizing upon me, carried me into a church-yard; and there, notwithstanding, all my prayers and tears, and protestations of innocence, stabbed me to the heart, and then tumbled me into a deep grave ready dug, among two or three half-dissolved carcases; throwing in the dirt and earth upon me with his hands, and trampling it down with his feet.’

There is a real and immediate physicality to this that is absent in the rest of Clarissa’s letters, real violence. Dirt and half-dissolved carcases are not the kind of things young Georgian ladies are meant to dream or talk about. It is tempting to interpret this as a sex dream, with its reference to stabbing and tumbling, and of course one would expect a young woman of this era to be apprehensive about the impending loss of her virginity – “innocence” – on her marriage, but I think the genuine fear here is palpable. For once this is no longer a game for Clarissa – she is slowly beginning to realise that sooner or later she is going to have to leave her warm protective family home with its servants and high garden walls, and have to face the real world in which she will be another man’s possession. No wonder she is terrified.

 

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Book review

Clarissa Harlowe, or the history of a young lady, by Samuel Richardson, 1748

Further subtitled “Comprehending the most Important Concerns of Private Life. And particularly shewing, The Distresses that may attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage“.

The good news is that I have finally finished volume one of ‘Clarissa’.

The bad news – for me – is that I have another eight volumes to go! This is indeed a monster of a novel, running to over 1500 pages. To preserve my sanity I am going to approach it as a series of novels, and may well break it up with lighter reading,

First impressions:

Clarissa is an epistolary novel, where the narrative is progressed through the characters’ correspondence. This has the advantage of showing us their thoughts and feelings, and given the frenzy with which Clarissa and her friends and family write letters, sometimes several in one day, including to members of the same household, gives an immediate reportage feel to the novel. The disadvantage of this format is that without an omniscient narrator there is little in the way of descriptive writing – we are only told what the characters believe to be relevant, which excludes the setting, their appearance, etc.

Clarissa, a rich young lady, is the subject of a fierce battle of will between herself and her family. Her father and other relatives want her to marry Mr Solmes, an even richer young man, who promises to add to the family’s overall wealth and status, and believe it is their right to dispose of their daughter as they see fit. She is valuable property, the more so now her grandfather has recently bequeathed her some money. She is disinclined to accept these arrangements. The family believe her refusal stems from an attachment to an unsuitable young man, Mr Lovelace. She adamantly denies any such attachment, but Richardson skilfully uses the differences between her descriptions of events and those of others to allow the reader to deduce that there may be some truth in their suspicions. An impasse is reached, which is where volume one ends, with the family resorting to ever more forceful attempts to persuade Clarissa to accept Mr Solmes, and she equally forcefully rejecting him.

The bulk of the novel (this volume at least) is formed of letters between Clarissa and her friend, Miss Howe. It is a significant moment when a third voice is introduced, that of Lovelace, who reveals himself as the libertine Clarissa’s family fears him to be. In Letter 35 Lovelace boasts to a friend,

“I will throw myself into my charmer’s presence. I have twice already attempted it in vain. I shall then see what I may depend upon from her favour. If I thought I had no prospect of that, I should be tempted to carry her off. That would be a rape worthy of Jupiter!”

This is one of those sentences that brings the reader up short – is Lovelace really lasciviously anticipating raping Clarissa? My initial reaction was that he might be using the word ‘rape’ in a special, eighteenth century context, a robust form of seduction. The word ‘ravish’ is sometimes used in this way, implying a more complex relationship than a simple assault. But I think that would be letting Lovelace off the hook – he clearly has every intention of having sex with Clarissa, and her consent is of little concern to him. Richardson makes it clear that Lovelace considers having sex with women a form of revenge.

“A rape worthy of Jupiter”.

We are, in this one packed phrase, at the heart of the novel’s sexual politics – Clarissa is a possession, the most prized component of which (in addition to her grandfather’s inheritance) is her sexual attractiveness, and in particular her ability to provide an heir. It is that value which is threatened by the lothario Lovelace, and that which her family imprison her in order to protect. It is another example of the double standards of the time, that Lovelace’s reputation for immoral behaviour is something that can quickly be forgotten when it comes to considering him a potential groom, when set against his considerable fortune and expectations.

Only eight more volumes to go!

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Book review

The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis, 1969

Kingsley Amis spent his whole career not writing a successful follow up to his great first novel,  ‘Lucky Jim’. I loved ‘Lucky Jim’ when I first read it several decades ago, and while the passage of years has eroded that affection somewhat, at the time it lead me to read as much Amis as I could get my hands on. That’s not to say Amis’s later novels were bad – the Booker prize for ‘The Old Devils’, as well as a couple of other shortlisting, attests to that. ‘The Green Man’ stood out at the time as something very different from Amis’ s usual portraits, so when the opportunity to revisit it came up I took it, wondering whether it would be as good, and as strange, as I remembered it?the-green-man

I am glad to say it was. The Green Man of the title is an inn owned and managed, after a fashion, by Maurice Allington, a another thinly disguised Amis self-portrait. The inn dates back to the 14th century, and comes with the usual stories of hauntings and the occult. Strange things start to happen. Allington sees what we are lead to believe are ghosts, although the heroic scale of his alcoholism leaves open the distinct possibility that there are just hallucinations. His elderly father suffers a stroke, which if anything spurs Allington on to even greater peaks of drinking. Nothing seems to dent his self-destructive urges, and on the day of his father’s funeral he pursues an affair with his neighbour, and persuades her to have a ménage à trois with his wife. As with many novels written by middle aged men, his sexual allure is irrestistible, and this plan succeeds, to a point – the orgy happens, but he finds it hard to get involved, and eventually gives in and goes off and has another drink.

Refusing to believe they are simply hallucinations, Maurice somehow finds the time to investigate the hauntings. He uncovers the long lost diaries of Thomas Underhill, a local scholar and former owner of the inn, who he believes to be the identity of the ghost. These diaries reveal that Underhill used the supernatural to seduce and or ravish young girls from the village, and may be the explanation for the current events. The paranormal themes of the novel now take centre stage, as it becomes clear that the ghosts are not simply the product of Maurice’s drinking (even if he is unable persuade anyone else of their authenticity). Underhill emerges from the shadows and persuades Maurice to unearth his nearby grave, in which he finds an ancient silver figurine, which in turn leads to a rather clumsy scheme which will cause the death of Maurice’s teenage daughter. Maurice frustrates this plan at the last minute, in part due to an intervention by another supernatural figure who we are led to understand is a manifestation of God. If this sounds bizarre, it is, although Amis’s undoubted skills as a story teller allow him to carry it off.

The Green Man is traditionally portrayed as a benevolent figure, and Amis’ s idea to transform him into a sinister, lumbering killer is inspired. It is a mark of a confident writer that he can combine genres – the comedy of the drunken, lecherous innkeeper frozen out of his own orgy – with the supernatural Underhill narrative. Allington is ultimately a bit of a tragic albeit resilient figure, and as usual with Amis it is the underwritten women characters who one would like to have seen more of, rather than just playing bit parts as figures of sexual interest. Overall however I was pleased to find this novel still in print, despite Amis being very much an author no longer in vogue, and enjoyed the nostalgic re-read.

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Book review

Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville, 1851

I now understand Moby Dick’s reputation for being unreadable. The core of the novel is the well-known whale-hunting adventure, with the obsessive Ahab pursuing the white whale to the ends of the farthest ocean, with the “from hell’s heart I stab at thee”, and all that.  This material would have made an excellent longer short story, a novella perhaps, with the excitement of the pursuit and the psychological portrait of the captain at its heart.zzmoby-dick

However, Melville chose to pad this story out to four or five times its length with an interminable, extraordinary amount of additional information about whales and whaling. It read very much as if he did a lot of background research to his subject and included it all in the novel. Can you imagine ‘Heart of Darkness’ with four hundred additional pages on the ivory trade? Or ‘The Great Gatsby’ with a detailed history of the prohibition movement? I found wading through the chapters on the different types of whale, how they are caught, processed, defined and anatomised really difficult, not least because of the brutality and callousness of the process, and the narrator’s wilful ignorance of the impact of nineteenth century whaling on the whale population.

If you can muscle your way past this issue, or perhaps find an expurgated version, there is plenty of interest elsewhere in the novel. Whaling was a dangerous occupation, and the thought of the small sailing boats setting off to harpoon mighty sperm whales has become an iconic image. I am sure I was not the only reader who at times was cheering on the whales. The opening chapters of the novel, when Ishmael meets Queequeg the cannibal harpooner, are very different in tone from those towards the end, and are surprisingly funny. Their relationship is openly homosexual and comically and euphemistically described. Ishmael advises the reader that it is ““Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” On their first night together sharing a bed, Ishmael catches sight of the “bald purplish head” of the “purple rascal,” and “shrieks” when Queequeg springs under the covers with his tomahawk. After some “kicking about”, Queequeg begins “feeling” Ishmael; next morning they awake with “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner…You had almost thought I had been his wife.” That Melville was able to get this past his publisher, and the reading public, probably says more about their racism towards the strange habits of the South Sea islander than it does their tolerance of alternative sexual lifestyles!

Ostensibly the narrator of the novel is Ishmael, but we are told very little of his back story, and even less about him as a character. Increasingly as time passes he fades into the background, to be replaced with a traditional omniscient narrator who can see multiple separate and simultaneous events, is able to tell us what characters are thinking and feeling, and is indistinguishable from Melville himself. Call me Ishmael if you like, but Herman would be more polite.

The climax of the novel, a reward for those who make it that far, is stunning. It shows what a good adventure novel has been struggling to emerge all that time. The white whale is sighted, pursued, harpooned, and – well for once I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice to say it was not the one I was expecting. I am conscious I am being quite philistine here – I really should be exploring the novel’s heavy symbolism, its complex literary allusions, and the multiple literary styles employed. Certainly that’s all there for the reader who wants to explore in more detail and read the text with more care – I was simply glad to make it to the other side. Incidentally, this novel ends the nineteenth century section of my read through of the Guardian’s top 100 novels written in English.

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Book review, Pure Juliet, Stella Gibbons

Pure Juliet, by Stella Gibbons, 2016

‘Pure Juliet’ tells the story of Juliet Slater, a working class girl from London, who just happens to be a mathematical genius. It is one of an increasingly popular genre, the lost novel. Originally written by Stella Gibbons in the 1970’s, it was not published in her lifetime (she died in 1989) but was recently “discovered” by her family and has been marketed by the publishers with this narrative, rather than “the author didn’t think this was quite good enough yet but never got round to revising it” which is probably closer to the truth.pure-juliet

Cultural references set the first section of the novel, in which Juliet completes her A levels and leaves home to stay with an adoptive aunt, Miss Pennecuick, in her isolated country house in rural Hertfordshire, in the late 1970’s – punk rock, Friends of the Earth, and Star Wars are mentioned. Continue reading →

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Book review

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, 1957

“What’ll we do? What’ll we do? Let’s move”.

“I just won’t sleep,” I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”

If you had to summarise this novel in two quotes, there you are!on-the-road

‘On the Road’ tells the breathless story of the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, “two broken down heroes of the Western night”. Set in the years immediately after the Second World War, Sal and Dean, young men of no known occupation or visible means of support, criss-cross America restlessly by car, train and plane:

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’

‘Where we going, man?’

‘I don’t know but we gotta go.” Continue reading →

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American literature, Book review, science fiction'

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, 1953

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”

Bradbury’s seminal dystopian novel is one of the key texts of the McCarthyite era in post-war America. Bradbury describes a world in many ways very much like his own, but where firemen burn books, where the population are distracted from an understanding of their lack of freedom and the threat of nuclear war by the bread and circuses of wall-sized flat screen televisions, and in-ear “sea-shell thimbles”, and where suspects are hunted down by helicopter and summarily executed on live television. Continue reading →

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review

Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, 1911

I finished this novel in something of a bad mood. It is a very bad book, and I resented the effort required to find any redeeming features. The fact that I found some in many ways made my mood worse! As I reflected on the text, I slowly came to accept that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I originally thought. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Continue reading →

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Book review

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, 1850

Subtitled “The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)”

Originally published in nineteen monthly instalments, ‘David Copperfield’ takes the form of a personal narrative, with this evocative introduction:david-copperfirled

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”

The largely autobiographical plot follows the young David as he is orphaned, sent to school, and slowly makes his way in the world, eventually becoming a prosperous author.   Continue reading →

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