Asides

Book review
BloodyChamber.jpg

The first edition of The Bloody Chamber, published by Gollancz

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is her breakthrough 1979 collection of short stories in which several well-known fairytales are updated and given a modern twist. Several of the stories had previously been published elsewhere – only two were original to this collection. At the time of publication there was some debate about whether Carter had imposed a feminist interpretation on these stories; some forty years on that debate seems a bit irrelevant – the ten very varied stories can stand in their own right without the imposition of such limiting categorisation.

The first and longest of the tales is The Bloody Chamber, which is loosely based on the traditional story of Bluebeard. A teenage girl marries a wealthy French Marquis for his money. He seduces her with ostentatious gifts including

a choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat

and whisks her off to his mysterious castle. Left on her own she explores the library, quickly discovering his disturbing collection of pornography. This is a warning of what is to follow. After their first night together he is called away to business in New York, leaving her again alone in the castle. Before leaving he gives her the keys to the castle and tells her she can go anywhere except to one forbidden room, the bloody chamber of the book’s title. Guess what she does? She of course breaks her promise and promptly goes to his secret room, where she discovers the murdered bodies of his earlier wives, all gruesomely presented as trophies. But the latest wife, our narrator, is not going to go without a fight. Bluebeard has met his match. This story hints at the close relationship (for some) between violence and sex, without perhaps ever going the full Fifty Shades, observing

“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”

The Courtship of Mr Lyon faithfully follows the traditional narrative of the Beauty and the Beast story. The only concession to modernity is that Beauty’s father seeks assistance at the Beast’s chateau after having car trouble rather than merely getting lost in the woods. But this conformity with the original story is presented as a contrast with the next iteration of the tale, The Tiger’s Bride. Here a woman is lost to the Beast (in the shape of a tiger) in the form of a gambling debt. In an ending to which Shrek owes a debt, instead of true love transforming the beast into a man, it is the heroine who transforms into a tiger.

The next story, Puss-in-Boots, is a comic interlude in the increasingly dark stories. Puss, a sardonic narrator of the story, helps his young dissolute companion seduce a young woman kept in a tower by a her miserly, older husband.

In The Erl-King a young woman is seduced by the sinister Erl-King, who plans to imprison her by turning her into a bird. She avoids this fate by strangling him with his own hair. If one were looking for feminist reworking of folklore outside the principal story this would be a good place to start – the Erl-King is a sexual predator and his intended victim a strong woman who sees past his sexuality and is happy to use violence to protect herself.

The Snow Child is the shortest and for me the most disturbing story in the collection. It is also the most heavily symbolic and allegorical. A Count and Countess ride out in deepest winter. The Count wishes for a child “as white as snow”. A young woman magically appears at the side of the road; she picks a rose, is pricked by a thorn and dies. Perhaps she is killed by the magic of the jealous countess?  

The Lady of the House of Love is a retelling of the vampire myth. A soldier, travelling by cycle through Romania, is lured to a mansion where a beautiful vampire tries to seduce him. His virginity somehow protects him from her, and he escapes only to have to face the greater horror of World War I.

The final three stories are variants on the Little Red Riding Hood story. In The Werewolf A girl is attacked by a wolf on the way to see her grandmother. She cuts its paw off, but when she reaches her grandmother’s house it is revealed that the grandmother was the werewolf. She is stoned to death by the villagers, who were are told are always quick to dispose of older women suspected of witchcraft in this manner. The Red character is here an unreliable narrator, and the suspicion lingers that she has attacked her grandmother in order to secure her cottage for herself. The next version of this story is The Company of Wolves which of course was turned into a feature film directed by Neil Jordan. This is a complex narrative with a number of stories within the story.  A witch turns a wedding congregation into wolves. A young couple are about to have sex on their wedding night, but the husband goes outside, never to return. She eventually remarries and has children, only for her first husband to finally reappear in wolf form. In the final story within the story yet another version of Red this time the wolf masquerades as the hunter before eating the grandmother. Red refuses to be scared by the wolf, and seduces him.

“See! Sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”

In the collection’s final story, Wolf-Alice, Red is now a feral child raised by wolves. She lives with a vampiric Duke. When the duke is shot and wounded by the inevitable angry villagers, Alice saves him by tenderly licking the blood and dirt from his face.

In The Bloody Chamber Carter breaks multiple genre boundaries. On their own the stories are carefully crafted little gems, but the cumulative impact is unsettling and powerful.

 

The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter, 1979

Aside
Book review
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

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The Castle of Otranto is widely considered the first English gothic novel. It tells the story of Manfred, lord of Otranto and opens on the day of the wedding of his son Conrad to the princess Isabella. Shortly before the ceremony Conrad is crushed to death by an enormous helmet which falls on him. Yes, it does. This is the first of a series of absurd incidents that punctuate the novel, usually involving over-sized body parts for reasons I have yet to come to terms with.

There is a prophecy (of course there is) “that the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it”.

Just in case you are wondering, no, this doesn’t make any sense, at this point in the story nor subsequently. Lord Manfred decides to marry Isabella himself, which will necessitate divorcing his current wife, Hippolita, who has failed to successfully bear him an heir. Isabella is not keen on this idea, having just seen her fiance crushed by a giant helmet, so she flees to a neighbouring monastery with the aid of Theodore, a mysterious peasant and Jerome, an aged friar. Jerome, it turns out, is Theodore’s long lost father. Again, predictably.

This is just the start of a madcap rush of incidents in which long lost relatives and giant body parts are packed into the novel’s just over one hundred pages. There are ghosts, there are mysterious mute knights, plots and mistaken identity, duels and feasts. It’s all rather exhausting, like reading a plot summary for half a dozen Shakespearean comedies all mashed-up together, and all written in a florid, over-the-top style of which the following is a typical example:

“I come,” replied he, “to thee, Manfred, usurper of the principality of Otranto, from the renowned and invincible Knight, the Knight of the Gigantic Sabre: in the name of his Lord, Frederic, Marquis of Vicenza, he demands the Lady Isabella, daughter of that Prince, whom thou hast basely and traitorously got into thy power, by bribing her false guardians during his absence; and he requires thee to resign the principality of Otranto, which thou hast usurped from the said Lord Frederic, the nearest of blood to the last rightful Lord, Alfonso the Good. If thou dost not instantly comply with these just demands, he defies thee to single combat to the last extremity.”

See what I mean? The Knight of the Giant Sabre, who has recently mislaid his Giant Helmet. Is he trying to compensate for something?

It’s really dreadful. One Goodreads reviewer (who actually liked it!) described it memorably as the “kind of story a man hopped up on crack might shout to passersby from beneath a bridge“. It joins Sybil on my list of novels written by MPs, which is mercifully short. Walpole has a lot to answer for, not least a whole genre of similar nonsense. As always I look for redeeming features in particularly bad novels, and I recognise that judging an eighteenth century novel – which I think I can call experimental, in that no-one else had written anything like this before – by twenty-first century standards has its limitations. But I am struggling. The prose is over the top (see above), the characters two dimensional at best, the plot absurd: no, not a single redeeming feature. It was, I suppose, also mercifully short. 

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 1764

Aside
Book review

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

Published in this edition by Orion books in their Science Fiction masterworks series, Flowers for Algernon is a much loved sci-fi classic. Flowers For Algernon (S.F. Masterworks), Daniel Keyes, Used Excellent Book

Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. He enjoys working at his menial job at a bakery. In the evenings he attends a college for “Retarded Adults”. Here he meets Professor Nemur who is looking for a a human guinea pig for his new surgical technique to increase intelligence. The surgery has already been performed successfully on a mouse named Algernon, who is now something of a super-mouse, able to solve maze puzzles with ease.

The novel takes the form of Charlie’s own ‘progress reports’ notes (i.e. his diary). Initially the diary entries are illiterate, full of phonetic spellings and without any punctuation. Following the operation they improve dramatically as Charlie begins to expand his understanding and knowledge. It is never really explained why the researchers try this procedure out on someone of below normal intelligence. Is it because if the surgery doesn’t work they won’t be sued? Or is it because the boost to intelligence will be so dramatic that in a normal human the impact would be too unpredictable?

As Charlie’s IQ soars he quickly leaves his old life behind. He struggles to cope with the dramatic changes to his abilities and understanding. This causes emotional turmoil, and is the basis of a lot of commentary about the apparent trade off between the benefits of intelligence and blissful ignorance. I was hoping that Keyes would have something to say about how a super-intelligent human might see the world differently. Sadly Charlie is more like a troubled teenager, trashing his room, refusing to do his homework and having rows with his family.  There is little else to show for his new abilities. He makes no scientific breakthroughs, discovers nothing.

Or not quite nothing. Charlie takes over the research into intelligence and discovers a flaw in the process meaning his boost in IQ is likely to be temporary. He faces this fate with a degree of resignation, even visiting the depressing institution where he is likely to end up. He tries to use the time left to him wisely, but all too quickly the old Charlie is back. Keyes reflects this degeneration poignantly through Charlie’s reversion to the fractured English used in his original notes.

Flowers for Algernon was originally a short story which Keyes later expanded into novel-form. I think the central concept – artificially enhanced intelligence – is a slight idea that probably fits better into the more straightforward format of the short story. Asking it to carry the weight of a full-length novel without any additional support is too much. Keyes doesn’t seem to know what to do with Charlie once he is super-intelligent, apart from showing him as a bit of a brat. As I mentioned in opening, this novel is much loved. People seems to have a nostalgic affection for Charlie and his mouse. So what are people seeing that I have missed? The novel has almost half a million ratings on Goodreads, scoring overall on average more than 4 (out of 5 – for comparison, Brighton Rock scores lower than 4). Reviews consistently talk about the novel being heartwarming and touching. My heart was neither touched nor warmed. I found the story profoundly predictable – there was never a moment’s doubt that Charlie’s boost in intelligence was going to be temporary. Super-intelligent Charlie is pretty unlikeable. He does nothing tangible with his enhanced powers – he learns languages, writes musical compositions, and so on, but there’s no substance to this, and the hoped-for insight into any of his areas of study never arrive. More to the point there’s no attempt to consider what super-intelligence actually means – is it just being cleverer than every one else, or is it a different level of consciousness? It was this kind of insight I was hoping for. Instead we are invited to feel sentimental for a dead mouse.

Writing in 1981, Philip K. Dick. 1981 defined sci-fi as:

“our world transformed into that which it is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society—or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one—this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind.”

This of course is one of many definitions of the genre, but it is one that commanded my attention as being a serious attempt to engage with the problem of genre rather than simply provide a template for is it/isn’t it decisions. Flowers for Algernon satisfies the criteria for science fiction in many of the more narrow definitions of the genre, but fails to make the cut here if Dick’s more comprehensive and compelling definition is used. Super-intelligence doesn’t ever once hint at generating a new type of society. The surgery which improves Charlie’s intelligence is given some credibility – there is talk of enzymes and amino acids – but the researchers could just as easily have given him a “make-you-clever” pill. Nothing else changes in the world – the changes are all within Charlie and his perceptions and abilities. Every other aspect of the society is recognisable, and we are not even given a hint of the way the world might change if the surgery had been successful. In other words, I am not convinced that Flowers is even science fiction, let alone a masterwork.

 

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, 1959

Aside
Book review

It is often an instructive experience to revisit ‘children’s’ stories occasionally. Rereading them as an adult can reveal layers of meaning not obvious to a younger reader. As a child I wasn’t initially aware of the Christian allegory in the Narnia stories, for example (until being beaten round the head with the idea in The Last Battle). Similarly, books like Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver’s Travels both work successfully as adventure stories for children and as more complex novels for adults.Black Beauty by Anna Sewell - First Edition - c. 1950s - from ...

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is another case in point. Written as a first person narrative by the title character, it was originally conceived as a plea for compassion in the treatment of working horses (in much the same way as The Water Babies was a campaigning tract about the treatment of child chimney sweeps). Sewell wanted to bring the plight of working horses to public awareness and in particular to end the practice of unnaturally raising carriage horses’ heads with the “bearing rein”. Stripped of its social and historical context it is now a straightforward story about the life of a horse.

But I was struck on reading the novel how clearly it also reads as an anti-slavery tract. Forget for a minute that this is a book about horses, and read these lines from early in chapter one:

Our master was a good, kind man. He gave us good food, good lodging, and kind words; he spoke as kindly to us as he did to his little children. We were all fond of him, and my mother loved him very much….I was a dull black, so he called me Darkie.”

As long as Black Beauty is well cared for he accepts his enslavement with resignation. He describes how he is broken into wearing reins and a bridle:

I had of course long been used to a halter and a headstall, and to be led about in the fields and lanes quietly, but now I was to have a bit and bridle; my master gave me some oats as usual, and after a good deal of coaxing he got the bit into my mouth, and the bridle fixed, but it was a nasty thing! Those who have never had a bit in their mouths cannot think how bad it feels; a great piece of cold hard steel as thick as a man’s finger to be pushed into one’s mouth, between one’s teeth, and over one’s tongue, with the ends coming out at the corner of your mouth, and held fast there by straps over your head, under your throat, round your nose, and under your chin; so that no way in the world can you get rid of the nasty hard thing; it is very bad! yes, very bad!

There’s no attempt to disguise the distress Beauty experiences during his “breaking in” (a phrase also used to describe the brutal treatment of slaves until they came to accept their captivity). But however accepting of his condition, Beauty is aware that he is still a possession, vulnerable to being sold to a new, less kind master at any time:

I was quite happy in my new place, and if there was one thing that I missed it must not be thought I was discontented; all who had to do with me were good and I had a light airy stable and the best of food. What more could I want? Why, liberty! …Straps here and straps there, a bit in my mouth, and blinkers over my eyes. Now, I am not complaining, for I know it must be so. I only mean to say that for a young horse full of strength and spirits, who has been used to some large field or plain where he can fling up his head and toss up his tail and gallop away at full speed, then round and back again with a snort to his companions—I say it is hard never to have a bit more liberty to do as you like.

He also knows that if he breaks down physically and becomes no longer useful or wanted he is likely to be disposed of, either sold on to ever more difficult work, or sent to “the dogs” – that is to say slaughtered and sold as dog food. When his friend Merrylegs the pony is sold to a neighbour it is seen as a kindness that

“it was on the condition that he should never be sold, and that when he was past work he should be shot and buried. “

(This line of argument, that Black Beauty is a form of slave narrative, is developed by the wonderfully named Bonnie Blossom in this article.)

I am not arguing that Black Beauty is an anti-slavery tract, not least because slavery had been abolished in the USA a decade before it was published, and much earlier in the UK – the moral argument had been won. But awareness of the brutality of slavery was still very much in the public imagination, and viewing our treatment of domestic animals as being analogous to the way slaves were once treated, adopting some of the traditional narratives and characteristics of slave stories, gives a powerful emphasis to Sewell’s argument for kinder treatment of horses. Putting it simply, we feel for the mistreated horses in the novel because they are treated like slaves.

This is a progressive novel in other ways. Sewell argues forcefully for the retention of the Sabbath as a day of rest. Beauty’s driver, Jerry, is tempted to work on Sunday’s for a reliable customer, but turns down the work as he wants to preserve his time with his family:

“If working  men don’t stick to their Sunday … they’ll soon have none left; it is every man’s right and every beast’s right. By God’s law we have a day of rest, and by the law of England we have a day of rest; and I say we ought to hold to the rights these laws give us and keep them for our children.”

This initial position of not working on the Sabbath for religious considerations is then generalised into a wider argument for the protection of working men’s conditions of employment, and their collective power through industrial action, specifically withholding their labour (a later chapter is called “A Strike for Liberty”):

“That may sound well enough, but it won’t do; every man must look after his own soul; you can’t lay it down at another man’s door like a foundling  and expect him to take care of it; and don’t you see, if you are always sitting on your box waiting for a fare, they will say, ‘If we don’t take him some one else will, and he does not look for any Sunday.’ Of course, they don’t go to the bottom of it, or they would see if they never came for a cab it would be no use your standing there; but people don’t always like to go to the bottom of things; it may not be convenient to do it; but if you Sunday drivers would all strike for a day of rest the thing would be done.”

Elsewhere Sewell argues from a moral standpoint that:

“With cruelty and oppression it is everybody’s  business to interfere when they see it”

This is typical of the muscular Christianity that informs much of the reforming literature of the Victorian era.

The novel also contains a striking portrait of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, told from the perspective of Captain, “An Old War Horse”. We are not told directly that his reminiscences are of this battle, but the descriptions are unmistakeable:

“I cannot tell all that happened on that day, but I will tell of the last charge that we made together; it was across a valley right in front of the enemy’s cannon. By this time we were well used to the roar of heavy guns, the rattle of musket fire, and the flying of shot near us; but never had I been under such a fire as we rode through on that day. From the right, from the left, and from the front, shot and shell poured in upon us. Many a brave man went down, many a horse fell, flinging his rider to the earth; many a horse without a rider ran wildly out of the ranks; then terrified at being alone, with no hand to guide him, came pressing in among his old companions, to gallop with them to the charge.

“Fearful as it was, no one stopped, no one turned back. Every moment the ranks were thinned, but as our comrades fell, we closed in to keep them together; and instead of being shaken or staggered in our pace our gallop became faster and faster as we neared the cannon…..

our gallant company was cruelly overpowered, and those who remained alive after the fierce fight for the guns came galloping back over the same ground. Some of the horses had been so badly wounded that they could scarcely move from the loss of blood; other noble creatures were trying on three legs to drag themselves along, and others were struggling to rise on their fore feet, when their hind legs had been shattered by shot. After the battle the wounded men were brought in and the dead were buried.”

I said, “I have heard people talk about war as if it was a very fine thing.”

“Ah!” said he, “I should think they never saw it. No doubt it is very fine when there is no enemy, when it is just exercise and parade and sham  fight. Yes, it is very fine then; but when thousands of good brave men and horses are killed or crippled for life, it has a very different look.”

The enemy must have been awfully wicked people, if it was right to go all that way over the sea on purpose to kill them.”

This vivid description of the battle makes an interesting contrast to the jingoism of Tennyson’s better known account. Sewell uses the apparent naivety of the horses to point out the simplicity of seeing war as ourselves versus “awfully wicked people”.

There is also a fascinating description of Beauty’s reaction to his first encounter with a steam train, which captures much of the Victorian shock at the force of this new technology.

I shall never forget the first train that ran by. I was feeding quietly near the pales which separated the meadow from the railway, when I heard a  strange sound at a distance, and before I knew whence it came—with a rush and a clatter, and a puffing out of smoke—a long black train of something flew by, and was gone almost before I could draw my breath. I turned and galloped to the further side of the meadow as fast as I could go, and there I stood snorting with astonishment and fear. In the course of the day many other trains went by, some more slowly; these drew up at the station close by, and sometimes made an awful shriek and groan before they stopped. I thought it very dreadful, but the cows went on eating very quietly, and hardly raised their heads as the black frightful thing came puffing and grinding past.

Reading the novel as a form of slave narrative, chapters on the Crimean War and the coming of the steam train – these are all points of interest. But the novel as a whole is repetitive. Beauty is sold to a new owner, he gets to know him and his new role, there is an encounter with another horse, and then an incident that leads to the next owner. Repeats over forty or more chapters. Events are described through the child-like innocent eyes of Beauty or his friends, with sufficient context for the reader to identify the wider commentary implicit and explicit in the narrative. All washed down with a gentle Christian sensibility (at one point a human watches a character leave and says to himself “Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of these”, which as I am sure you know is from Matthew in the King James text of the Bible). There’s a banality to the repetition of the story arc over time which leaves the reader restless for the inevitable happy ever after. 

Footnote

A while back I wrote about the use of the word “gammon” as a term of disrespect. There is another instance here where it is used as a euphemism for “hypocrite”. Beauty’s driver takes a fare for an urgent job having previously refused one. Asked how much he earned he replies:

“A good deal more than I generally get…..what he gave me will keep me in little comforts for several days.”

“Gammon!” said one.

“He’s a humbug,” said another; “preaching to us and then doing the same himself.”

Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell, 1877

Aside
Book review

I am having a really poor run at the moment – this was the latest of a series of disappointing novels, in many ways the worst of the lot! It was Coetzee’s first Booker Prize winner, the other being Disgrace in 1999.

Life & Times of Michael K is set in a dystopian South Africa in which a civil war is being fought. The protagonist Michael K is born with a hare lip. He is also what was once thought of as “simple” and although not an orphan was effectively abandoned as a child and sent to live in an institution. A doctor who later treats him explains:

He is a simpleton, and not even an interesting simpleton. He is a poor helpThe Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee, Good Bookless soul who has been permitted to wander out on the battlefield, if I may use that word, the battlefield of life, when he should have been shut away in an institution with high walls, stuffing cushions or watering the flower beds

In many ways this is a simple journey story. Michael works as a gardener and his mother is an ailing domestic servant. Law and order is breaking down in the coastal city where they live. Michael’s mother persuades him to help her escape the conflict and privations of the city and take her on a biblical exodus to her home town near the mountains. She dies during the journey, but Michael continues his pilgrimage alone, carrying her ashes with him. He settles in an abandoned farmstead, living off the land and making rudimentary attempts to grow food.

Michael’s time in the wilderness also has biblical overtones – his attempts to scratch a living from the surface of the earth is a hard, unremitting grind for the reader. The allegorical nature of Michael’s suffering is subtle but nevertheless unavoidable – this must be an allegory because otherwise it would be utterly meaningless.

Eventually he is captured as an undocumented citizen, suspected of working for the resistance, and sent to a prison camp. By now his fragile health has deteriorated further, and he appears to be starving. I haven’t been able to locate the original source of this claim, but I have read that Coetzee has said in interviews that the inspiration for this novel was a newspaper article about a captured panda that refused to eat the food it was fed in captivity. Once captured Michael K adopts the same approach, although there is no suggestion that this is a hunger strike or anything other than an illness. It is more an inability to eat than a refusal. He continues to lose weight, and the doctor who narrates the novel’s second section struggles unsuccessfully to understand his motivation for refusing food. I wasn’t comfortable with the portrayal of an illness as a philosophical protest or existential statement.

Michael eventually escapes from the camp, and in the last section returns to the city. He meets some vagrants who appear more attuned to life outside civilisation, and who effectively adopt him. At this point, with no suggestion that Michael has come to any resolution of his situation, the novel ends abruptly and inconclusively.

It is hard to care for Michael K. He is passive and has nothing of interested to say about his experiences. It is possible we are intended to see him as a Forrest Gump-like figure, with his simple lifestyle and even simpler thought processes giving us insights into the human condition. If that was the intention then I can’t say it worked. Towards the end of the novel Michael acquires a more analytical monologue which for some reviewers sits unconvincingly with his former passivity and incomprehension. His thoughts become positively philosophical:

How fortunate that I have no children, he thought: how fortunate that I have no desire to father. I would not know what to do with a child out here in the heart of the country, who would need milk and clothes and friends and schooling. I would fail in my duties, I would be the worst of fathers. Whereas it is not hard to live a life that consists merely of passing time. I am one of the fortunate ones who escape being called.

Michael is an innocent adrift in a world of sin and corruption, but my appetite for parables is a bit jaded at the moment – perhaps I need some escapism and an interesting story instead? The New York Times said in a review that Coetzee’s theme in this novel is “the wild and merciless power of inanity.” If you are looking for a novel about the inane then look no more, this is the one.

 

Life & Times of Michael K, by J M Coetzee, 1983

Aside
Book review

Notorious for being described by one of the 1994 panel of Booker judges* as “crap”, How Late is Was, How Late is a stream of consciousness novel written in ‘Glaswegian demotic’. It spans a week in the life of Sammy, a shoplifter and ex-convict, who gets drunk, fights with the police, and is beaten by them so badly that he is blinded. The assault happens in the opening weekend leaving the bulk of the novel to relate his clumsy and sometimes tragi-comic attempts to come to terms with his condition, to navigate the streets of Glasgow, and make a half-hearted claim for disability benefit. He refuses almost all help despite desperately needing it, and slowly reveals a small amount about his past, including two long spells in prison.

The language of the novel will be a challenge for many readers. Here’s a short extract by way of illustration:

Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can’t ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck…”

You will note how the narrative point of view and tense wanders. Initially the narrative is in the first person, but then the text starts referring to Sammy as “he” – illustrating, I suppose, his sense of alienation – he sees himself as a secondary character. If you read that and thought it was relatively easy to follow, just think of the cumulative impact of nearly 400 pages of its unrelenting incoherence. The 4000 “fucks” weren’t really a problem for me – people do speak that way – but the question was do I want to listen to them? Did Sammy have anything interesting to say, or is he just a confused incompetent?

How Late sat on my bookshelves unread for what was probably decades. I was put off by the extraordinarily dull cover (see above) and more seriously by the ferocious dialect. In truth it really only takes a few pages to understand the conventions Kelman uses, such as “the gether” for “together”, “sodjers” for police, and so on, and to get into the rhythm of the Glaswegian voice.

I was hoping some coherence would be brought to the narrative – that we would find out more about why his girlfriend has disappeared for example. But we never do, and puzzlingly Sammy never makes any attempt to find out. He is anxious to ensure that family and friends don’t find out about his blindness, and even when he eventually consults a doctor there is no serious discussion on whether the condition is temporary or permanent, possible referral to a specialist, or any treatment. Earlier the police arrest Sammy for reasons that are never explained but may be something to do with an associate who has a more substantial criminal record. Any hope that these threads will combine or end up making any sense are left unfulfilled. 

I kept waiting for the book I hoped Kelman was writing to emerge from the shadows, but to my huge disappointment it never did. There is clearly a lot Sammy decides not to tell us – although why he would conceal it from himself is not obvious – and while we do find more out about him over the course of the novel, much is left unsaid. What I expected to happen is that the slow reveal would finally piece together, and that pieces would fall into place, revealing the explanation for the randomness of Sammy’s life, why he refuses to seek help for his blindness, where his girlfriend has gone and why he doesn’t seem that interested in finding out. Late in the novel his teenage son Peter is introduced. He obviously cares for his father and is anxious to help him, but Sammy rejects his offers of help (apart from his money) and lies comprehensively to him, swearing him to secrecy about his sight loss for reasons which seem more to do with pride than anything else. Perhaps it is just middle-class of me to expect Sammy’s like to have some structure or reason, rather than just being the one big mess it is.

Overall this was hard work. Sammy is profoundly unlikeable, showing occasional glimpses of intelligence which are misleading – he quickly reverts to a bovine refusal to accept any assistance or attempt to improve his desperate situation. I appreciate that in creating Sammy Kelman wanted to give a voice to the oppressed working class, and Sammy’s independent streak and refusal to accept assistance is in some ways admirable, but in fact the novel does the working class a disservice. Most working people simply would not behave in the irrational way Sammy does throughout the novel. They accept help when needed, and their relationships are important enough for them to ask after their partner when they disappear. Their lives may be chaotic and disorderly, but they are not without reason.

 

*Julia Neuberger. In a later, generally positive review, the Guardian called the novel “a miserable slog” and in a masterly understatement “unlikely to improve anyone’s beach holiday”!

How Late it Was, How Late, by James Kelman, 1994

Aside