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Book review

Paradise by Toni Morrison, 1997

Paradise has a gripping opening:

They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here.

The rest of this complex, challenging novel is all about unpicking this first sentence – what has driven these men to attack these women? 

They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the convent, but there is time, and the day has just begun. They are nine. Over twice the number of the women, they are obliged to stampede or kill, and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement–rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, mace, and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns.”paradise

Readers of Morrison’s previous novels might be expecting the “they” in this opening paragraph to be white racists attacking a black community, perhaps in the civil rights period if not earlier. Any expectations of this kind are quickly confounded. It soon becomes clear that this is an exclusively black community brutally cleansing itself of the inhabitants of a troublesome women’s communal shelter.

Ruby, a town of some 360 souls, was founded as a refuge for its inhabitants, in recognition that black communities were always going to face racism from white neighbours and authorities. This retreat into isolation and seclusion followed a brief period after the civil war when some black community leaders rose to positions of prominence, only to be stripped of those roles as part of the removal of civil rights that in turn took many decades to restore. Ruby is a successor community to the earlier Haven, also a black-only town, intended (as the name implies) to create a place free from racism and prejudice. As part of the building of the community the founding fathers constructed a communal oven of brick and iron. This oven carries a heavy symbolic burden representing everything the people of Ruby have achieved. The name of the new town, originally “New Haven” derives from that of a young woman who died when she was refused medical attention because of her race. The town has no jail or cemetery because, it is claimed, it has never needed either, although this is what is known surely as tempting fate?

Anxiety about Ruby’s future comes to crystallise in concerns about the nearby “convent”, a refuge for women with nowhere else to go, a mirror image of the town.  The building sense of crisis comes to be crystallised around  plans to change the slogan on the Oven: though it now says only “… the Furrow of his Brow”, the town elders claim it used to say “Beware” at the beginning, whereas the younger generation wishes to make it “Be the Furrow of his Brow”. In parallel to learning the history of Ruby we learn the back-stories of the inhabitants of the ‘convent’, a mansion ominously designed like the cartridge of a gun. The description ‘convent’ is colloquial but incorrect – the house was originally a boarding school for native American girls until it closed and became the refuge of today. (In writing this post I am struggling with tense – “is” or “was” – this is at least in part because the narrative is so fluid in terms of time, jumping freely from decade to decade.) The tipping point in the troubled relationship between the town and the convent comes when some men in the town are scandalized when the Convent women make a rowdy appearance at a wedding between members of two of Ruby’s founding families. 

This is a classically “difficult” novel. There is little exposition – a sequence of point-of-view narrators tell their stories, explaining little and only slowly coming to the point at which their lives bring them to Ruby. Some things are never explained – for instance one character, Mavis, flees an abusive husband and family following the death by suffocation of her young twins. These deaths are almost too horrific for her to consider face-on, so we only get brief snippets of information about how they came to die or be killed, and about her culpability or otherwise for their deaths. The memories and reminiscences of the multiple narrators range freely over time, and it can often be hard to tell when and where the events being described happened. It’s a little like looking at a jigsaw before the pieces are assembled. If you read a traditional review of this novel it will normally try to pieces these pieces together for you, or at least join up the edges, and lay them before you in a sequential narrative – this happens, then this happens, etc. But reading the novel is obviously a very different experience – we find things out, if ever, when the author tells us, and it can be many pages between a scene or situation being described and us finding out what may have happened. This complexity is further compounded by the scale and ambition of the novel. There are dozens of characters involved in the narrative, and I defy any reader on a first reading to keep track of who they are and the complex web of family relationships between them. I can only assume that the author knew we would be unable to retain all this information on a first read. So is the experience of reading this novel intended to be muddled and unclear, or are we being invited to return for further readings?

I have written about complexity in novels many times before, such as here, and I should be clear and re-emphasise that complexity isn’t inherently either good or bad. I have tried to read books where the complexity was such I gave up, but that was my failure rather than that of the author. Complex books can be rewarding in ways that straightforward narratives are not, however frustrating they can be at the time. Which is a way of avoiding the question of whether the complex nature of Paradise makes it a rewarding read or not. Initially I couldn’t make my mind up, so I read some reviews.

The New York Times was pretty savage:

“Paradise” is everything that “Beloved” was not: it’s a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing, thoroughly lacking in the novelistic magic Ms. Morrison has wielded so effortlessly in the past. It’s a contrived, formulaic book that mechanically pits men against women, old against young, the past against the present.

Zoe Heller in the London Review of Books was less strident but still had serious reservations:

 At some point, all Morrison’s major novels seem to lose patience with the finicky business of recording moral blur, choosing to swerve off into the realm of moral fable and preacherly uplift. Often, as in Paradise, the change is marked by an onset of gloopily ‘miraculous’ events.

Adam Mars Jones in the Guardian agreed with the LRB’s concerns about the mysticism in the novel

If Morrison had resisted the temptation to bring in possession, ghosts and amateur miracles, Paradise might have attained the status of masterpiece. As it is, reading the book is too often like standing next to someone with a pair of powerful binoculars trained on a distant view. From her impassioned commentary on what is going on you long to share her vision, but when she passes the binoculars across, the focus wheel is missing or jammed.

This is a novel that confounds readers’ expectations. It is not an easy read, and I am not yet convinced that the complexity works in the way it does in, for example, the work of William Faulkner, of which I kept getting strong echoes throughout the novel. I can certainly understand the reservations of the reviewers quoted here, that frustration with a novel that never fully comes into focus.

It would be wrong of me to close this post without paying tribute to the author who died last month aged 88. Her life was one of remarkable achievement, culminating in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 2012 she was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2016 she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She was unquestionably a giant of American literature, and through her work provided a way for America to come to terms, at least in a small way, with its past.

 

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Book review

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989

The Remains of the Day is a subtle, detailed portrait of a life of self-control, restraint and sacrifice. It is narrated by Mr Stevens, an ageing butler, who in 1956 takes a road trip to the West Country, to visit a former colleague, Mrs Dean, formerly Miss Kenton. In the course of his largely uneventful trip he reminisces freely about his long career of service. It has been a prestigious career at the height of his profession, or at least so he claims, but there has been a price to pay for this commitment to the demands of his role.

We are used to flawed narrators in modern literature, in which the detRemainsails of the story emerge in the gaps between what the narrator tells us, and what we can perceive is actually happening. Here Ishiguro pushes the flawed narrator concept even further – Stevens’s memories are carefully layered to reveal a portrait of a man profoundly reserved and out of touch with his feelings, who comes to fear that he has wasted his life, and worse still will waste what remains to him. Several memories are revisited more than once in the course of the novel, with Stevens’s revisions and corrections revealing each time further insights into his decisions and thought processes.

The ostensible purpose of his road trip emerges over the course of the novel. Initially we are told that Stevens is planning to ask Miss Kenton to return to Darlington Hall, the scene of his long years of service to Lord Darlington, and more recently to an American employer, Mr Farraday. Darlington Hall was once a large prestigious establishment, but is now sadly reduced with large areas of the hall closed up, and only a skeleton staff. Stevens has received a letter from Miss Kenton which he chooses to interpret as indicating that she wants to return to her post as housekeeper. At this time we know little about their relationship, and Stevens only gives us unreliable glimpses of the past, but he slowly builds a picture of a warm friendship which could easily have become something more. Later he confesses that he may have read too much into her letter, and that his visit has more a more personal agenda. He mentions several other former acquaintances that he has lost touch with over the course of the years, and it becomes apparent that this trip is, for Stevens, (although he would never admit it) a last attempt to rekindle an old flame and recapture some of the former glories of his past. Stevens is an expert at self deception, and his explanations for his conduct – for example when he pretends to the villagers he meets when his car breaks down that he is a gentleman, rather than a servant – are always plausible but ultimately unconvincing.

In parallel with this personal account of his life, Stevens reveals the story of his former employer, Lord Darlington. Lord Darlington, it slowly becomes apparent, was a Nazi-sympathiser and supporter of appeasement, and after the outbreak of the second world war was publicly disgraced. Stevens avoids admitting that he was butler to Lord Darlington in the post-war present, even though privately in the confines of his personal narrative he defends his former employer as having been well-intentioned if ultimately misled by those he trusted. In one scene he recounts the story of his being asked by Lord Darlington to fire two servants because they are Jewish. He does so despite the passionate protests of Miss Kenton, taking the approach that it is not his role to question his employer’s decision.

The pace of the novel and the lack of incident in the present have led to some reviewers expressing frustration with this novel. Stevens’s buttoned-up, restrained personality, and his habit of expressing himself with precise, non-committal language that never expresses his true feelings. When his father dies for example, we can only tell he is upset because someone notices he is crying, something he would never admit to doing himself.

Certainly there are no car-crashes, chases or fist-fights in ‘The Remains of the Day’. If you are looking for dramatic incident, look elsewhere. This is a novel of subtle details, precisely chosen words, and delicate portraits. The reader needs to invest in the narrative – if they do so the rewards are worth it.

Did you enjoy ‘Remains’? Did you prefer the film, which was undoubtedly brilliant, but arguably placed too much emphasis on the romantic aspects of the novel? Or was the lack of incident a problem for you? Would really like to know what you thought.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, Book review

The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, 1962

The Golden Notebook is a complex narrative. The writer, Anna Wulf, uses four notebooks to record different aspects of her life, and at the end of the novel attempts to unite them in a fifth, gold-coloured, notebook. The novel waves together several parallel narratives, and at times it can be hard to work out whether we are reading Anna’s personal account of her life, or her fictionalised version. In addition to the ‘realistic’ narrative of Anna’s life – Free Women— the four notebooks – black for her adventures in Africa before World War 2,  red for her time as a on/off member of the British Communist Party, yellow for a fictionalised account of her relationships, which sometimes run ahead of the real life telling of her story, and at others behind, and blue for her personal journal of memories and dreams.TGN

The non-linear narrative Lessing uses was ground breaking for its time – there is little in the way of conventional story telling. When the novel was first published the focus in many critical responses was on Lessing’s frankness in sexual matters, and what were seen at the time as her feminist characters. 50 years and more on, the presentation of sexual relationships in the novel seems dated – perhaps inevitably. As a feminist character Anna in particular is utterly defined by her relationships with men – and while she is sexually liberated, her emphasis on being sexually available to men who pay her very little regard shows her vulnerability. In the final section of the novel, the apparently unifying golden notebook, where the tale of her relationship with Saul Green is fictionalised, virtually every encounter with Green, however strained or disagreeable, almost always ends with the throwaway line “and then we made love”.

In a Guardian piece written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, Margaret Drabble put this point more clearly:

“As a feminist and a free woman, living a life of what was then striking promiscuity, her protagonist Anna Wulf displays some curiously traditional female behaviour, which is even more puzzling on rereading. On one page she can declare, shockingly but truthfully, that “every woman believes in her heart that if a man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency.” But this same woman (albeit writing in a different notebook, about a later period in her life) is discovered preparing a meal for the man she loves and knows she is about to lose. Much care is lavished on this memorable set piece describing a breaded veal escalope with mushroom in sour cream, a dish that the defaulting man never turns up to eat. Throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing. …. And yet it seemed liberating at the time.”

The novel has a number of other dominant themes: the Cold War and the decline of the British Communist Party, the end of Empire, and not least the personal breakdown of the central character. Often the novel seemed increasingly self-referential – so for example the novel’s opening lines are “The two women were alone in the London flat”; much later, to help relieve her writer’s block, Anna is given an opening line for her novel, which of course is “The two women…” etc. Novels which have as their central character novelists are always going to go down this road.

To be frank I found ‘The Golden Notebook’ very hard work. It is very long, very repetitive (to read about a dull relationship is one thing – to read about it twice, once in the central character’s diarised version, and then again in her fictionalised, slightly changed but essentially the same, version – is quite another. I doubt I would have troubled to finish were it not for a reluctance to admit doing so in this blog, which I think says it all. Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, 45 years after ‘The Golden Notebook’ was published – 45 years in which Lessing published a great deal, but was never to repeat the critical or commercial success of her earlier work. It looks a little like a lifetime achievement award, which is understandable, but doesn’t make this novel any easier to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Book review

Voss, by Patrick White, 1957

Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 “for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature” (I think what this is saying is that White was the first great writer about rather than from Australia). Of ‘Voss’, the citation said it is “an intensive character study against the background of the fascinating Australian wilds”. Faint praise, don’t you think?Voss

Briefly, ‘Voss’ tells the story of Continue reading →

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Book review

An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro – 1986

This novel addresses what most be one of the most difficult issues a country has to ever face – how to come to terms with overwhelming military defeat. For Japan, that defeat was all the more painful because its involvement in World War 2 was completely avoidable; and the end of the war, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so shocking and final. Ishiguro’s approach to this subject is to walk slowly round it, quietly approaching and then stepping quickly away as soon as the subject becomes too raw.

I am being oblique myself, so let’s explain. The narrator is a painter, Masuji Ono. He has lost a son and a wife in the war, but his two daughters survived. One is married, one going through the complex engagement process used by some Japanese families at the time (and for all I know is still in use). The time structure used in the novel is complex; although each section is dated, giving the reader a misleading reassurance as to the date of the events of that part of the novel, Ono’s account wanders across time, gradually revealing details of his career as a painter. Discouraged by his father from becoming a painter, he runs away from home, and becomes an artist of the floating world – a particular genre of art in Japanese culture. Very slowly Ono reveals his involvement in the rise of Japanese nationalism, and his subsequent disgrace and the rejection of his values by the new, post-war generation. This reveal takes the whole of the story arc, and even then one is left with the distinct impression that we have only been shown a small part of the story.

Ono is a reflective character – he is certainly a deeply flawed narrator, as one would expect, but he is not delusional – he knows that his involvement in Japanese nationalism, painting pictures encouraging the expansion of the empire, was wrong, although the extent of that recognition is unclear: at one point he admits “There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life”, although this is more of a tactical admission than a confession. Ono’s grandson plays an important part in the narrative – he is a really brattish, unpleasant little eight year old, who is encouraged (by his grandfather) to believe that his gender gives him authority over his mother.

There is a profoundly hesitant, tentative feel to the novel. Ono tiptoes around his story, rarely revealing much, and constantly admitting that his recollection may be flawed, The reader is given enough information to piece together the outlines of his story, but only through hints and only rarely through actual events – at one point we are shown him visiting the house of one of his students, who he has reported for anti-nationalist feeling, and it is clear that the authorities reaction has been extreme – we found out earlier that the student was imprisoned for a long time, and apparently tortured. Ono doesn’t understand, or refuses to understand, his responsibility for this situation.

Ishiguro is clearly a writer of some considerable skill – the novel is quite deliberately like a delicate Japanese watercolour, done with great finesse. But the characters – other than Ono himself – are only tentatively drawn – we only see them through Ono’s eyes, and he doesn’t trouble to sketch them in any detail. The language is equally delicate and riven with hesitation, again quite deliberately, giving a very authentic flavour to the narrative, but leaving the reader a little bit detached and remote – the speeches are overly polite, and you need to listen carefully to the subtext to understand what the speakers are really saying, even if the narrator usually misses the point.

Japan clearly went through a huge, if self-imposed trauma before, during and after the Second World War. The price paid was enormous, and understanding how that come to happen is important. Ishiguro gives us one witness’s flawed account, but it is very much that of someone who had only a small, marginal involvement in the tragedy, and I am not sure that it tells enough of the story to be of any value. The book ends without any big reveal, and so does this review.

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