Asides

Book review

Yes, you read that correctly – the Tuesday Club Murders, by Agatha Christie, not The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. The similarities in name are striking though aren’t they? Although in interviews about his novels Richard Osman has regularly acknowledged his debt to Christie, I don’t (so far as I know) think he has ever mentioned this collection of stories. I can’t surely be a coincidence though.

To be fair, this collection of stories is usually published as ‘The Thirteen Problems’. It was first published under that title in the UK in 1932 and it wasn’t until the stories were published in the US the following year that the title The Tuesday Club Murders was adopted. Obviously the publishers have reissued the collection under the US name to capitalise on the popularity of Osman’s novels, even going so far as to describe the stories in the blurb as ‘the original weekday murder club’! To be fair they haven’t mimicked the distinctive cover design used for The Thursday Murder Club and its sequel, The Man Who Died Twice, unlike other recent murder mysteries, but they must have been sorely tempted to do so.

The introduction to the club does seem very similar to Osman’s version:

‘Well,’ said Joyce, ‘it seems to me we are a pretty representative gathering. How would it be if we formed a Club? What is today? Tuesday? We will call it The Tuesday Night Club. It is to meet every week, and each member in turn has to propound a problem. Some mystery of which they have personal knowledge, and to which, of course, they know the answer.’

But this is almost where the structural similarities end. This is a collection of short stories not a novel, and the ‘club’ structure is a weak framing device that isn’t really necessary. Apart from the title, the points of similarity between these stories and Osman’s novels are actually few and far between. They have a similar setting, and the Miss Marple would probably fit in quite well into the group of crime-solving pensioners in The Thursday Murder Club. But the Tuesday ‘Club’ isn’t really a club at all, nothing more than a story telling group of friends, who seem to only meet the once (despite the initial set up) , even if they were probably quite capable of taking on a ‘real’ case or two.

All thirteen stories feature Miss Marple, and all follow the same pattern quite rigidly – some friends gather and share stories about a crime, Miss Marple chuckles to herself and indirectly reveals she has worked out ‘whodunnit’, followed swiftly by the reveal of the criminal’s identity. Invariably she is knitting throughout the story, and almost always drops a stitch or two as a way of emphasising her powers of concentration. There’s little by way of characterisation – you will find more varied personalities in a game of Cluedo (Clue) – descriptive writing is kept to the minimum, and any deviation from the structure comes as a welcome but rare relief. Perhaps that is no surprise – these are some of Christie’s earliest published works, and the first time that Miss Marple appears in print. There is a brief attempt to bring Miss Marple to life in the opening story. She is described in more detail than any other character in the collection:

“She sat erect in the big grandfather chair, Miss Marple wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in round the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice. She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was knitting, something white and soft and fleecy.”

That’s an interesting portrait that’s worth unpicking a little. Firstly she is sitting in a grandfather chair. The internet is probably the world’s most useful information tool ever developed, but it can’t tell me precisely what a grandfather’s chair looks like – the best description is ‘an easy chair, usually with wings’. I think we can infer from the context that this is a significant, perhaps even dominant chair which allows Miss Marple a place of prominence in the gathering. The black brocade dress – brocade being defined as

“heavy cloth with a raised design often of gold or silver threads” – suggests she is formally if not over-dressed to receive her guests. Mechlin lace is interesting. Christie could easily have just dressed her character in ‘old’ or ‘ornate’ lace, but she specifically chose Mechlin, which is a relic from the nineteenth century and before. Wikipedia as always a mine of information, tells us that:

“In 1755 Mechlin lace went into decline in England….Mechlin lace was also very popular with the English royalty. Queen Mary II, in spite of the prohibition against imported laces, purchased two yards of knotted fringe for her Mechlin ruffles in 1694…George I had a Mechlin cravat, and it was a favourite of Queen Charlotte and Princess Amelia.”

In other words it was a bit old-fashioned even when Queen Victoria came to the throne, and almost a hundred years later I think we can safely say was not the height of fashion! The bodice over which this lace ‘cascades’ is out of date as well, She is dressed almost entirely in black, including black mittens and cap, which strongly suggests someone in mourning. There was no national mourning at this period, and there is no suggestion that she ever married or suffered a family loss. She is just one of those old ladies who prefers to wear black. The constant knitting might suggest a tricoteuse in the shadow of the guillotine, which is apt as Miss Marple’s detective skills would almost certainly have sent many men and a few women to the deaths. In A Christmas Tragedy, one of Miss Marple’s own contributions to the collection, she says of the story’s villain:

“Saunders was hanged .. and a good job too. I have never regretted my part on bringing that man to justice. I’ve no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment”.

Clearly Miss Marple isn’t just the sweet little old lady she likes to present herself as.

In detective stories the principal interest is in the challenge – can the reader work out the solution to the mystery before it is revealed? Christie is adept, even in these very early stories, of giving the impression that the mystery can be solved – after all, Miss Marple can work them out with only the information we the reader are given – but really the solutions are almost impossible, and in some cases quite random. The use of mystery poisons features in several of the stories, as do several other mystery story stand-bys – invisible ink, swopped identities, even Cornish smugglers.

I’ve been determined to add Christie to my list of reviewed novels – her absence seemed a real gap, but I don’t think I chose a very sensible starting point. These stories are static and repetitive, and I quickly lost interest in the crimes and their inevitable solution. Of course Christie went on to be a much more mature writer, and to judge her on the strength of this collection alone would be unfair. So she remains, for now, on my non-existent ‘to be read’ list.

The Tuesday Club Murders, by Agatha Christie, 1932

Aside
Book review

Klara and the Sun is narrated by the eponymous Klara, who is an ‘AF’ – an Artificial Friend, an advanced robot able to simulate and understand human emotions. Despite her intelligence Klara has a limited, child-like understanding of the world. The novel opens with Klara waiting patiently in her store to be bought. We learn that she is a specific type of robot intended as a child’s companion. She is solar powered, and therefore assumes that the sun has a significant role in all human affairs, a misunderstanding which would have been easily programmed away but which goes on to play an important part in the novel. Eventually she is purchased and taken to a remote family home, apparently somewhere in America. There are hints that American society is slowly breaking down, but this aspect of the novel, due to Klara’s very limited understanding, are never fully fleshed out. We also learn that in this dystopian future some children are genetically engineered (described here as “lifted”). This engineering seems to offer significant advantages in life, but comes at a serious risk of illness and death. Josie, the daughter of the family she has been bought to support, had an older sister Sal who died as a result of the lifting process, and Josie herself is seriously ill.

Through Klara we are introduced to Josie’s neighbour and childhood friend Rick. Rick has not been lifted and resents the impact this is likely to have on his career and life chances. This felt like fairly heavy handed social commentary – it’s not really much of a revelation that rich people have better prospects than the poor and that they can buy advantages for their children. The suggestion that any advantages come with a heavy price later in life is more subversive but it is not apparent how this translates to the real world – being rich and privileged doesn’t seem to have too many downsides!

Klara develops a theory about Josie’s illness which she is reluctant to explain in any detail, although it appears to have something to do with the sun. At first the reader believes this theory might have a grain of truth, but it quickly becomes clear that Klara has an essentially pagan understanding of the role of the sun in society and indeed of astronomy. She comes to believe that when the sun sets it ends up in a farmer’s barn on the horizon. She travels to the barn – it is suggested this is akin to an epic quest, although it is not clear why such a straightforward journey would represent a challenge to an advanced robot – and prays to the sun to save Josie. Klara offers a sacrifice in return for this favour – to destroy a machine which she believes in the sun’s enemy.

It slowly becomes apparent that Klara’s role is not just to be a friend to Josie. She is asked by Josie’s mother to imitate her daughter, and it is eventually revealed that if Josie dies, Klara is going to take her place as a disturbing if convincing substitute. I think you will by now have got the idea – this is not a science fiction novel, nor a traditional dystopian novel. Klara’s world is in some respects convincing, but in others very much the opposite. I particularly struggled with the idea of a robot being so powerful as to accurately understand and replicate human emotions, but not understand very simple concepts of astrology (as an example – Klara understands very little about the world apart from what she has observed from her shop window. Why robots would be solar powered was also puzzling! The mistakes she makes about the physical world, and the false conclusions she draws from her observations, make Klara a highly misleading narrator. Showing the reader the events of the novel and the world in which it is set through the eyes of someone – Klara in this case – who doesn’t really understand what’s going on and who makes some serious errors of understanding, is a very well established technique for encouraging the reader to see the world from a fresh perspective. The reader slowly across the course of the novel learns to decode Klara’s descriptions and work out when and how she gets things wrong, and when things are being carefully hidden from us.

The more I think about it, (and I finished the novel several weeks ago and have been turning it over in my mind ever since) the more I think the only way to read Klara and the Sun is as a parable, a modern Gulliver’s Travels. All the inconsistencies in the plot and the strange mistakes Klara makes about the world are unimportant when the novel is read that way. The anachronism of the steam-punk science is less obtrusive: we don’t need to understand why Klara’s parents would bafflingly expose her to a life-threatening treatment which had already claimed the life of her sister for little apparent benefit. But as a parable the novel is elusive – life is short and mysterious, and sometimes things happen for no particular reason. Klara is a thought-provoking novel, but I am not sure whether it works as a whole rather than as a collection of ideas that don’t cohere together as a whole. Perhaps it is one of those ‘go back and read it in a few years and see what you think’ novels?

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021

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Book review

The Dark Side of the Sun (playing on the title of Pink Floyd’s iconic 1973 album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, which to be fair makes a lot more sense) was first published in 1976, long before the Discworld series started with The Colour of Magic in 1983. It’s largely forgotten now, kept in print by Pratchett completists I suspect. It’s a fun, lightly sketched sci-fi adventure with numerous throw-away ideas. Fans of Pratchett’s later work will find references to Discworld jumping off the page every so often, which to be honest provided most of the entertainment. 

The novel is really a mystery written in a lightly comic tone very reminiscent of Douglas Adams. Set far in the future the galaxy is populated by fifty-two different sentient species, all of which evolved in the last five million years. Scattered across space are artefacts of ‘the Jokers’ an apparently extinct race of master engineers who may or may not have been the reason life arose in the first place. The only surviving piece of Joker text is a poem which says they have gone to a new home “at the dark side of the sun”.

Dom Sabalos, the novel’s protagonist, sets out with his tutor, Hrsh-Hgn and his Man-Friday robot assistant, on a quest to find the Jokers world. As he travels to the various populated planets he is hunted by a robot assassin who keeps missing despite having good luck engineered into his programme. Something or someone wants Dom to survive to find the Jokers. 

As a sci-fi story The Dark Side of the Sun is eminently forgettable. The science is so lightly sketched as to be closer to magic, and the characters are fairly one-dimensional. The ending is a bit baffling if I am honest. There are some clever ideas alongside quite a lot of clichéd characters and situations. But this will not matter to Discworld fans, who will find lots of points of comparison between this novel and the series. Hogswatchnight and Small Gods both first appear here, without much if any detail about what they are other than annual holidays or celebrations. This is very much in the style of Dark Side – not much detail is provided and the reader is left to fill in most of the gaps, making the novel an immersive experience as we build the world ourselves with the author acting as guide. 

Sir Terry was famously progressive, way before his time (books and programmes from the 1990’s now often come with warnings that they represent ideas and terms that were commonly used at the time but now may be considered offensive). Sir Terry’s works on the other hand have stood the test of time magnificently, and even this early in his writing career he is standing up for fairness and respect. At one point his robot speaks disrespectfully of one of the alien races they encounter, and his is firmly put in his place:

“There’s guards all over the place, boss. I can’t find that gecky frog anywh-”

“That’s shape-hatred talk, Isaac.”

OK, yes it’s a joke about what we now call political correctness, but the point is that the protagonist rejects the idea of judging people because of their body shape. In the 70’s jokes about otherness were the staple of most comic routines, but here we have Pratchett avowing such ideas.

There’s an early incarnation of the Assassins Guild here as well – when an assassin tries to kill Dom he is asked at one point: “I hope you were given due notice” to which he replies “Oh yes, three days and a regular United Spies contract.”

There’s even a character (a planet sized being) who speaks in caps, as famously practised by Death. 

If you enjoy Discworld then you might find some moments of The Dark Side of the Sun diverting. As sci-fi it’s inevitably dated and doesn’t pretend to be more than a fairly derivative piece of light entertainment. The switch to fantasy was the light-bulb moment for Pratchett and once he began the DW series he never really looked back. It’s still interesting to read this early work with its little hints of what was to come, but I recognise this won’t be for everyone.

The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett, 1976

Aside
Book review

NW really divided critics when it was published in 2012. Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, (published in 2000) was garlanded with awards: it won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award, was included in Time magazine’s 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005, ranked 39th on The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century, and BBC News included it on its 2019 list of the 100 most influential novels. The reception for NW, following 2002’s The Autograph Man and 2005’s On Beauty was much more muted. But I thought it was outstanding – a complex, mature work that uses experimental structures and techniques without ever seeming to do so for the sake of it.

Set in and inspired by the northwest suburbs of London, NW follows the stories of two friends, Leah Hanwell and Natalie (originally Keisha) Blake. Leah and Natalie grow up in a rough working class estate, Caldwell*. When we are first introduced to her, Leah has not ventured far from her childhood roots, but best friend Natalie has managed to transform herself into a successful barrister. Natalie lives in a nearby but much more affluent neighbourhood. Both women are married, and are apparently content with life.

The novel opens with a vivid scene when Leah falls for a well-practised scam. A young woman knocks at her door asking for money; she is facing a family emergency and needs to get to the local hospital as soon as possible. Leah spends a short time with the woman, eventually giving her money for a cab. Leah’s family, when they hear what has happened, mock her for her gullibility, but she had a connection with the young woman that felt genuine, despite the deception. The incident causes Leah to wonder about her sense of belonging in NW. Has she without knowing it moved away from her working class origins?

The next instalment of the novel follows a former friend of Leah and Natalie’s, Felix Cooper. Although Felix is ostensibly one of the novel’s main characters, this section of the novel feels less engaged; I got the impression that the author was just less interested in Felix. We follow him as he meets a former girlfriend, telling her that he plans to end their residual casual relationship. He needs to put her, and her drug use behind him. On his way home he is mugged and stabbed, and the novel moves on leaving his fate uncertain.

After the Felix scenes, the novel’s focus moves to Natalie Blake. We learn more about her back-story and how she grew up with, and then away from, Leah. Against all expectations she fought her way into university and became a successful barrister. She marries a banker, has two children with him, and appears the ultimate success story. But Natalie/Keisha, as her name suggests, has a secret – she leads a double-life and enjoys clandestine casual sex with strangers, apparently in an attempt to fill the void in her life.

NW is an overtly modernist novel in terms of the various narrative techniques the author uses – but that is not really important. In interviews at the time of the novel’s launch the author explicitly mentioned Joyce and seen in that context his influence is obvious. But neither this fact nor any of the other techniques she uses are in any way intrusive – the reader (or this one at least) never stops to admire the author’s style, the fourth wall is never broken, so engrossing is the story and so accomplished is the writing.

It is possible that White Teeth set expectations so high that it was always going to be hard to follow, but I suspect that if NW appeared today it would be lauded. It is a powerful portrait of a complex city that the author clearly loves and knows intimately.

————————————————————————————————————–

*Some reviews of NW talk about it having four central characters – Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan Bogle, (a criminal character who illustrates some of the other life choices people from Leah and Natalie’s class may have taken). Others write about there being three main characters, discounting Nathan, even though he probably features at least as much as Felix. But I believe that this is Leah and Natalie’s novel, that’s where the author’s real interest lies, and the other characters – there are many more than just Felix and Nathan – are secondary. Whether this is a helpful generalisation or not I am unsure, but I think the heart of the novel is the relationship between these two women.

NW by Zadie Smith, 2012

Aside
Book review

The Thin Man was Hammett’s last published novel, appearing initially in a magazine in 1934, although he went on to live until 1961. Hammett was a left-wing writer during a period of America’s history where this was very much going against the political grain, eventually finding himself blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House of UnAmerican Activities. Earlier he had gone to prison rather than reveal the names of contributors to a fund he set up to support eleven men appealing their convictions for “criminal conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the Government by force and violence.” It is fair to assume that it was these experiences which put him off novel writing, although of course he continued writing in other formats.

Hammett is widely credited with creating a new form of detective novel, the ‘hard-boiled detective’ genre. This was a world apart from the refined novels of writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, Raymond Chandler famously summarised the distinctive element of Hammett’s novels: that he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley“. The Thin Man is a fine example of this genre.  

Anyone reading the novel without being aware of the setting will be shocked to find out that the story is set in December 1932 – that is to say in the last days of Prohibition. Given that it remained technically illegal to drink alcohol in the USA, Nick Charles, the novel’s principal character, drinks relentlessly, asking for alcohol at every opportunity like a man dying of thirst. Nick is a former private detective, having retired early following marriage to a wealthy socialite, and is visiting New York with his much younger wife, Nora, to celebrate Christmas and the New Year (and presumably the impending demise of Prohibition). He is reluctantly drawn into investigating a complex murder. A scientist, the titular thin man, has gone missing, and his assistant and former girlfriend is found dead by his ex-wife, on whom suspicion inevitably falls. Their children also act suspiciously and are candidates for the crime, but the police’s focus is on the missing scientist, Clyde Wynant. Together with the local police Nick and Nora drink heavily and talk smart as they try to crack the case.

The focus on drinking throughout the novel is relentless and eventually quite funny:

 ‘“How do you feel?”

“Terrible. I must’ve gone to bed sober.”’

……….

‘“Don’t you think maybe a drink would help you to sleep?”

“No, thanks.”

“Maybe it would if I took one?”

…….

‘“Why don’t you stay sober today?

We didn’t come to New York to stay sober.”’

The dialogue is the whip-smart wise-cracking we have come to expect from private detectives and their glamourous assistants, but which Hammett seems to have invented:

“She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.”

Nick in particular has a great line in sarcasm, particularly when he is teasing his wife, who to be fair gives him as good as he gets:

“I’ll give you your Christmas present now if you’ll give me mine.”

I shook my head. “At breakfast.” “But it’s Christmas now.” “Breakfast.”

“Whatever you’re giving me,” she said, “I hope I don’t like it.”

“You’ll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the aquarium said he positively wouldn’t take them back. He said they’d already bitten the tails off the…”

……………

“Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: “What are you holding out on me?”

“Oh, dear,” I said, ” I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn’t know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the…”

The novel is fast-paced – Nick and Nora rarely seem to sleep, and think nothing of setting off at midnight to yet another party. The novel’s resolution seems a little hurried, with everything wrapped up in a few pages once the partying runs out of steam. The novel was very successful and spawned a film, a sequel, and a long-running television series. On its own merits the novel is enjoyable but slight – the reader’s enjoyment is mainly derived from the humour and the wide range of criminal characters, but the plot is almost an after-thought. The same could be said of many of Raymond Chandler’s novels, of course. Hammett was without doubt a profound influence on Chandler, and his style and technique can be found on almost every page of the latter’s work. At the same time I would argue (and I don’t think this is contentious) that Chandler evolved the genre to another level. The principal differences between the two are the latter’s extraordinary turn of phrase (“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”). Marlowe is also a much harder, more violent man than Nick, and the overall body-count in novels such as The Big Sleep is much higher. While Nick can shrug off a bullet wound with a light bandage and another slug of whisky, when Marlowe is beaten up we feel every blow.

P.S. I’ve written more here about the differences between Marlowe and Sam Spade, Hammett’s main character in novels such as the classic The Maltese Falcon.

The Thin Man, by Dashiel Hammett, 1934

Aside
Book review

The imbalance in my reading habits – more than three quarters of all the books I have reviewed over the last 10 years were written by men – has been nagging at me. I wanted to explore whether this was just a case of being a sexist reader, or a symptom of something else going on in publishing and literature.

In the field of literary prizes there is strong evidence that novels written by women are less well recognised than those written by men. Since 1969, 35 men and 18 women have won the Booker prize in its various incarnations. It was the absence of any women writers from the 1991 Booker shortlist that led to the creation of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (although the jury that year was evenly divided in terms of gender). This two to one ratio could be better, but it could be worse: the Pulitzer prize for ‘distinguished fiction by an American author’, has been awarded 70 times since 1948. By my calculation only 18 of these 70 awards have gone to women writers, including such greats as Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and Donna Tartt. The Nobel Prize for Literature is no better – only awarded to women 16 times out of a total of 118 awards. This is not just a phenomenon of old-fashioned attitudes – in the so-called progressive decades of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s it was awarded only once to a woman. And only one woman has ever been Poet Laureate in the 400 years of the role’s existence!

Elsewhere the issue persists. In the BBC’s 2003 Big Read less than a third of the novels chosen by the public were written by women, and without JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson the ratio would have been far worse. Only 21 of the 100 best novels of all time written in English chosen by the supposedly progressive Guardian (which is where this blog began) were written by women. The issue is obviously endemic. Other than where specific action is taken to address the imbalance between men and women writers (for instance on some university courses), male writers predominate.

Which obviously begs the question as to why? In The Authority Gap Mary Ann Sieghart cites evidence that novels written by women are reviewed less often than those written by men, which starts the whole process of down-grading the value placed on books written by women. From what little evidence I have been able to track down, women are not published less frequently than men. But that’s not to say that women authors aren’t promoted less effectively by their publishers, placed less predominantly in book-shops, cited less often in academic works – it’s even possible that Amazon’s algorithms are sexist (stranger things have happened). To be clear, I have not identified any evidence of these things – but there is a pattern here!

It may be a statement of the obvious, but we shouldn’t have to accept this diminution of half of the population. All of the examples above are instances of people making decisions to exclude or downgrade women. So the solution is in some ways simple: all literary prizes should work towards being gender neutral. That means choosing to have a balance of women and men on judging panels (as many already do), choosing to long-list and short-list works by men and women evenly, and award prizes evenly, if necessary by having two different awards. As readers we can buy books by more women, review them as often as we review books by men, and try to avoid the discrimination, unconscious or otherwise, that has been going on before Gutenberg developed his printing press.

More on men reading women

Aside
Book review

Bodily Harm felt strangely familiar: the premise of the novel echoed strongly with me, but I am struggling to pin down from where. In the novel Rennie Wilford, a Canadian ‘lifestyle writer and journalist’, suffers an upsetting relationship breakdown following surgery for breast cancer. In an attempt to escape she engineers an opportunity to travel to the small Caribbean island nation of St. Antoine to write a travel/holiday piece. Here she finds the island uncomfortable and alien, but slowly becomes embroiled in the febrile local politics. An attempted coup or insurrection goes badly wrong, and Rennie is caught up in the aftermath.

Frustratingly I can’t identify what book or books this reminds me of. It is possible that the cumulative effect of so many tropes is what is causing this ‘deja lire’ phenomenon.

The contrast between Rennie’s life in Toronto and her experience on the islands is striking. At home she was originally a political journalist specializing in unspecified ‘abuses’ but now writes about ‘lifestyles’:

“You write about something until people become tired of reading about it or you become tired of writing about it, and if you’re good or lucky enough it’s the same thing. Then you write about something else.”

Rennie lives with Jake, an unpleasant sexually aggressive and frankly abusive young man. He has a vacuous job as a label designer

“not just labels but the total package: the label, the container, the visuals for advertising. He was a packager. He decided how things would look and what contexts they would be placed in, which meant what people would feel about them”,

Canadian culture is portrayed as synthetic and superficial, and Rennie is profoundly unhappy without really realising it. Her breast cancer diagnosis brings this unhappiness to the fore, and shortly after Jake moves out Rennie comes home one day to find two policemen waiting for her, inspecting a sinister coil of rope left on her bed by an intruder. This is the catalyst for her getting out of Toronto, albeit temporarily. The Caribbean island state of St. Antoine is undeveloped and unwelcoming, and Rennie never takes her purported mission, to write a travel piece about the island, very seriously. She meets a number of ex-patriates including Paul, a drug smuggler who may or may not also work for the CIA and Lora, a fellow Canadian who has ended up in St Antoine with no real idea as to why. She also meets some locals including Dr. Minnow who is a candidate in St. Antoine’s elections, the first since independence from the British. What starts as a travelogue degenerates into a nightmarish experience as St. Antoine’s political factions go to war, and outsiders are all suspects.

Bodily Harm is not a comfortable read. St Antoine becomes a metaphor for Rennie herself, almost as if her vacation is a dream in which her various traumas are worked through and the characters represent aspects of her life back in Toronto. Her cancer is echoed in the rottenness of the island’s political corruption; the sado-masochism of her relationship with Jake is paralleled in the violence she encounters, and the novel’s conclusion in which she is imprisoned while her involvement with the island’s insurrectionists is investigated is (arguably) a metaphorical representation of her illness and slow recovery. Read this way Bodily Harm is a disquieting portrait of contemporary life rather than the superficial story of a journalist taking a vacation in the Caribbean that it initially promises to be.

Bodily Harm was the novel Atwood wrote immediately before The Handmaid’s Tale which was published four years later. Atwood is not a genre writer, and all of her novels that I have read thus far are significantly different, so it is difficult to find any trace of Handmaid’s in this novel. Having said that the theme of sexual violence being part of everyday life for women does indicate the lines the author was thinking on at the time and which were much more fully developed in the later novel.

Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood, 1981

Aside
Book review

Some reasons for reading (or re-reading) Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary:

  1. it’s the perfect ‘guilty pleasure’ novel
  2. it doesn’t take itself seriously
  3. the pop culture references are fun
  4. the jokes work
  5. Bridget is highly believable and relatable.

Bridget Jones’s Diary originally appeared as a weekly column in the Independent. Bridget is in her early thirties and when the novel opens she is single and looking for a partner. These are the mid-nineties, long before online dating, so she has to find a boyfriend the old-fashioned way – at work or through family and friends. While she rejects the concept of a ticking biological clock, being single into old age is something that preys on her mind.

She doesn’t remain single for long however. Her mother’s attempts to set her up with a family friend, Mark Darcy, at Una Alconbury’s New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet fall flat, but she succumbs instead to the charms of her lecherous boss Daniel Cleaver (the casting of the film version of the novel was inspired in giving this role to Hugh Grant, who is name-checked in the novel, and the role of Mark Darcy to Colin Firth, who of course played Darcy in the television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, also mentioned in Bridget’s diaries). Daniel is the universal bad boy, who ignores Bridget, insults her, refuses to take their relationship seriously and unsurprisingly cheats on her. Mark is there to pick up the pieces, of course.

Bridget is an immensely likeable character. Her diaries chronicle her insecurities and her struggles with her various demons (jobs, weight, drinking and smoking), but she has a strong network of friends who support her through all her relationship and career crises. Bridget’s parent’s relationship struggles provide a form of chorus or background to her own. The novel’s parallels with Pride and Prejudice are not over-emphasised and are done just cleverly enough to be funny without being smug. Like many novels, films and programmes from the nineties, there are aspects of the diaries that haven’t aged well. Sexual harassment in the workplace is treated as a joke and Bridget’s gay friend Tom is referred to using a slur that is now widely considered offensive. There are no black characters despite the novel’s London setting, and some people have found Bridget’s focus on her weight problematic.

This is one of the small category of novels where the film adaptation is so superior to the original that it is hard to read the novel now without having the film scrolling in the background of one’s mind, hearing Bridget’s diary as voiced by Renee Zellweger, and envisaging the costumes, settings and minor characters as portrayed in the film. I don’t think that’s a problem at all – the novel gains from the film rather than suffering from the comparison, allowing the reader to skip over the bits that don’t work (for example Bridget has a redundant brother in the novel who is mentioned but doesn’t appear, so was rightly edited out of the film).

Bridget Jones’s Diary is sometimes credited as being the first ‘chick-lit’ novel (Wikipedia describes it as “the ‘ur text’ of chick lit”). But the term is a fairly dismissive not to mention sexist characterisation of a genre and the term is little used nowadays, thankfully. Usually reading the source novel of a film reveals some interesting differences, but in this isolated instance I think if you have limited time I would recommend the film over the book.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, 1996

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Book review

The Bookshop is set in the sleepy coastal Suffolk town of Hardborough — “an island between sea and river”. In 1959 the novel’s ‘heroine’ Florence Green opens a bookshop in the long-vacant property called Old House, one of the oldest properties in the town. There is surprisingly some local opposition to her venture. This opposition centres on local notable Violet Gamart who has been toying with “the idea of converting it (Old House) into some kind of centre — I mean an arts centre — for Hardborough“. Old House is an unlikely location for an arts centre – it has stood empty for years, is quite small (from what we can tell) and is riddled with damp, not to say that it also seems occupied by a ‘tapper’, the local word for a poltergeist. Is there something more to Mrs Gamart’s plans than meets the eye – what is problematic with the idea of a bookshop?

Florence ignores Mrs Gamart and goes ahead and opens her shop, employing a young assistant, ten-year old Christine Gipping, to help out. Christine is by far the liveliest and most interesting character in the novel, although the author’s continual reference to her pre-pubescent state is a little creepy:

“Christine replied that now the evenings were getting longer her elder sister would be up in the bracken with Charlie Cutts… ‘You don’t need to worry about anything like that with me” she added, “I shan’t turn eleven till next April. Mine haven’t come on yet.”’

Lightly comedic episodes ensue as Florence struggles to make a success of her venture. She secures the patronage (of sorts) of Edmund Brundish, who is the nearest thing Hardborough has to aristocracy, and turns to him for advice when trying to decide whether to stock Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The novel is a best-seller but the usual suspects are horrified at both the book’s subject matter and the shop’s subsequent success. I was hoping that the novel might explore the explosive impact Lolita would have had on a small-minded English town in the late 1950’s, but that opportunity is passed by.

I was quite harsh towards The Gate of Angels, Fitzgerald’s 1990 novella about a fictional Cambridge college, not least because of its lack of authenticity. Novels don’t have to be realistic, of course they don’t, and the author can introduce elements of fantasy for many different reasons. But novels that purport to realistically portray a social setting and believable characters need to at least aspire to being authentic, or alternatively to have a really good reason why authenticity is departed from. And time after time Fitzgerald fails this simple test. The poltergeist that haunts the bookshop is an obvious example – perhaps it represents the town’s hostility towards Florence’s enterprise (although it pre-dates the shop’s opening). But there is no real attempt to integrate the ‘rapper’ into the narrative – it is just there, then it is not. Another example relates to the portrait of ten-year old Christine. While she is a well-developed character, are we really expected to believe she chipped/lost her two front teeth by them being hit by frozen washing on the laundry line? That’s just nonsensical and not in the least amusing. Possibly it is intended to show how hard life is for the Gipping family, and how resilient they are despite everything thrown at them – but teeth broken by frozen laundry is such a clumsy unconvincing way of showing this. Similarly we are invited to believe that Christine is the first child in her family to not pass the eleven plus. She is instead assigned to the local technical college, which her mother describes as “what we call a death sentence. I’ve nothing against the Technical, but it just means this: what chance will she ever have of meeting and marrying a white-collar chap ?” Only about one in eight children passed the eleven-plus, so the idea that bright Christine would have been the old child in their family not to pass is hard to credit. There’s also a description of a new housing development built on the edge of quickly eroding cliffs – another instance where the novel forfeits all credibility for the sake of a clumsy metaphor.

Probably most ludicrous proposition in the novel is the idea that a ‘stupid’ backbencher could draft, propose and pass through all its Parliamentary stages a major change to planning law, including late amendments which allow compulsory purchase orders in a wide range of circumstances, which is then implemented in a matter of months, simply to find a mechanism to lever Florence out of her shop. A generous buy-out proposal from Mrs Gamart would have been infinitely simpler. I understand that Fitzgerald wants to demonstrate that life and the powers that be are unfair to well-meaning people like Mrs Green, but this is an incredibly heavy-handed way of making that point.

There are moments in the novel which almost bring it to life. I did enjoy for example Mr Brundish’s encounter with Mrs Gamart, when his lack of an internal monologue leads him to speak his mind openly to her:

‘”You had better offer me something” he said loudly, and then, in precisely the same tone: “The bitch cannot deny me a glass of brandy.”‘

There’s far too little of this character, and Fitzgerald kills him off casually almost immediately after this encounter in order for her primary scheme – the compulsory purchase of the shop – to go ahead. Instead we see far too much of Milo North, a lazy dilettante whose purpose in the novel never really comes into focus.

Fitzgerald is highly thought of and considered by some critics to be under-appreciated. I can’t agree. When you compare this slight, unconvincing novel to J L Carr’s A Month in the Country for example, you can see the huge gulf between them. Both are sketches of life in rural England, but Carr’s characters come alive, are recognisable and have interesting stories to tell. It would be unfair to say Fitzgerald’s don’t come to life in the same way but they are light sketches compared to the vividness of Carr’s portraits.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1978

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Book review

This incredibly authoritative not to say weighty biography of Britain’s greatest novelist left me with a renewed respect for Dickens the author, but some of the revelations left me equally disappointed with Dickens the husband and father.

Slater’s biography follows the traditional format of all such works. Dickens’s early life is recorded in detail elsewhere, not least by Dickens himself in an autobiographical fragment published soon after his death by his close friend and first biographer, John Forster. Slater claims that the period when Dickens’s family went through hard financial times and had to withdraw him from school and send him to work, aged 14, in a blacking factory, was a key turning point in his life. It, Slater argues, haunted him for the rest of his life, and he constantly returns to it in his work, letters, and personal life. That point felt overstated, although I obviously defer to the author’s infinitely more detailed knowledge of Dickens’s life and work. Once these years are over, the text is focussed on composition of Dickens’s 14 novels which provide a structure for the text, although there is a vast amount of other works to be included, recorded, referenced and analysed.

Even if you know Dickens well this book will probably contain some surprises. I didn’t know for example that his early novels – including Pickwick, Oliver Twist, & Nicholas Nickleby – were essentially improvisational. While writing them Dickens had no clear plan where the plot was going, nor in the case of Pickwick whether the text was ever going to be printed as a novel at all, rather than remain as a serial, comparable to modern-day soap-operas. The idea of turning this series of stories with a common theme into a novel seems to have occurred to Dickens quite late in the day. As his work matured Dickens planned his novels more carefully with detailed notes on characters and plot-lines, but he rarely wrote more than a few weeks ahead of publication, sometimes cutting things very close indeed. Publishing his work in this way had an important impact on his plotting decisions. Any large scale editing is virtually impossible. Novelists who prepare their whole work prior to publication (i.e. virtually all of them today) can make substantial changes up until the last minute, deleting characters, going back to the beginning of the novel to provide subtle clues to the outcome, etc. While Dickens could fine tune his choice of words when the novels were published in volume form, major plot changes were impossible. (Authors who publish series of novels face a similar challenge – J K Rowling must surely have wanted to be able to go back to Philosopher’s Stone and add some more clues about Harry’s scar or tidy up the messy timeline of the first chapter, The Boy Who Lived?). This feature of his way of working imposed a discipline on Dickens’ plotting which he never seems to have worried about, but it would be interesting to read the novels in this light and look at his technique for avoiding painting himself into too many corners. One example which Slater points out is the strange opening to The Old Curiosity Shop, which begins in the voice of an unnamed first person narrator (“Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking” who quickly fades out of the text to be replaced by an omniscient narrator. According to Slater this is because the story started as a magazine sketch intended for only one or two editions, and when Dickens decided to adapt it as a longer form novel the switch in narrator was made at that point. The reader doesn’t really notice this switch in voice, but in retrospect is does appear unusual.

Dickens’s prodigious work ethic is another prominent feature of this biography. There was no point in his adult life when Dickens wasn’t working virtually flat out, at several points writing two novels at once. His novels are only a small part of his output: his collected journalism and letters run to many volumes, and he seems to take on major new projects even when he is completely overwhelmed with work. His was also a prodigious travellers, criss-crossing the country for his readings and popping over to France to see his young lady friend several times a month. In addition of course he also managed two major tours of the USA.

The weak copyright laws of the time meant that Dickens was openly plagiarised throughout his career, most typically in the form of stage adaptations. Slater tells us that “between March and December 1838 no less than five unauthorised adaptations of Oliver appeared in the London theatres.” (121 – for context, Oliver Twist was published in monthly instalments between February 1837 and January 1839). This issue only got worse – “no fewer than seventeen different stage versions (of his Christmas story The Cricket and the Hearth) appeared in London within a month of the book’s publication.“(239). There was an ironic twist to this plagiarism. In the rush to copy his work theatres would put on productions of his work before their serialisation had finished, forcing them to anticipate the novels’ endings. There is some evidence that Dickens used these versions of his works to give him ideas on how to end them – Slater cites evidence that in his composition of Little Dorrit Dickens “looked back for help with the plotting of an unauthorised dramatisation of the first part of the novel”.

This is an extraordinarily thorough account of Dickens’s life. Slater chooses to structure his text around his subject’s literary life, which his personal life less of a focus. His early romances, his marriage and ten children are all mentioned, as is the end of his marriage and his late romance with Ellen Ternan, but there is a sense of restraint in the narrative, a lack of speculation and a focus on the literary output and Dickens’s creative life. I did wonder whether the biography, structured as it is around the construction of the 14 principal novels, would have been such a compelling read if the reader was not familiar with Dickens’ work? But I guess no-one tackles a 600+ page biography without at least a certain familiarity with the novels.

I have written elsewhere about Dickens’ extraordinary consistency as a novelist. That comment was about his style – he seems to have landed on a discursive, dramatic and comic style of writing early on in his career and it remained with him largely unchanged throughout. My contention was that unless you knew the chronological sequence of his novels you would be hard pressed to tell, based on the writing alone, whether his work was early, middle or late period Dickens. But there is another way in which he was consistent, and that was in the length of his novels. All his novels were published in instalments – either weekly or monthly. The earlier novels did not have a predetermined plot nor number of instalments they were intended to fill, so their length varies significantly – Pickwick is almost twice as long as Oliver Twist. But once the format and number of instalments was settled down, the consistency of the length of the novels is extraordinary. Look at this list:

1.David Copperfield: 357,489
2. Dombey and Son: 357,484
3. Bleak House: 355,936
4. Little Dorrit: 339,870
5. Martin Chuzzlewit: 338,077
6. Our Mutual Friend: 327,727
7. Nicholas Nickleby: 323,722
8. The Pickwick Papers: 302,190
9. Barnaby Rudge: 255,229
10. The Old Curiosity Shop: 218,538
11. Great Expectations: 186,339
12. Oliver Twist: 158,631
13. A Tale of Two Cities: 137,000
14. Hard Times: 104,821
15. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: 96,178 (first 6 of 12 parts only)#

Yes, David Copperfield and Dombey and Son are almost identical lengths, to within 5 words in a total of over a third of a million. That’s an insane level of accuracy. Copperfield was published in 19 monthly one-shilling instalments, containing 32 pages of text and two illustrations, with the last instalment being a double-number (in other words, twenty instalments). Dombey followed the same pattern – 19 + 1 instalments, 32 pages, 2 illustrations. So it’s not surprising they are around the same length. But identical? The <10% variance in the top seven novels in this list can be explained by the length of the monthly instalments and the number of illustrations rather than any variation in Dickens’s plots or characterisations. Other authors were published in the same instalment formats as Dickens, indeed many of them in his magazines (Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, to name but two) and I would imagine their word length would be similar given the circumstances. But I confess I haven’t checked in any detail. (A quick look at the number of pages shown on Collins’s Goodreads page gives a range of 528 pages for The Moonstone to 672 pages for The Woman in White and 748 pages for No Name). There must surely be a strong case for arguing that no other author would have had Dickens’ discipline, to produce content week after week, month after month across almost all his adult life, to such a precise degree of accuracy.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review that I came away from this book feeling a little disappointed with Dickens the man. He discarded his wife with whom he had ten children, and ‘took up with’ a woman twenty years younger than him. We can’t be certain about the precise nature of this latter relationship but we can have a pretty good guess! He estranged his children from his wife, characterising her as a bad mother, and disrespected her in his will. His politics, particularly in relation to the trade union movement and issues of race, were not as progressive as they are often characterised. Slater is very open on this point – he doesn’t try to sugar-coat Dickens’s weak-spots, but neither does he over-emphasise them. Dickens was capable of change, and his approach to the way Fagin is characterised in Oliver Twist is a good case in point. He goes from being an openly hostile anti-Semitic caricature to in later editions a much more nuanced portrait, with far less emphasis on his race.

I’ve some way to go before I can claim to have read all of his novels, but this biography has given me a renewed appetite for continuing my tradition of an annual Dickens.

#(I found these statistics on the internet, and I haven’t separately verified them. I did a spot check of Copperfield and the word count was very close, with a small variation explainable by how you count the index, chapter headings, etc. )

Charles Dickens, by Michael Slater, 2009

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