"Ben, in the World" by Doris Lessing

The sequel to The Fifth Child. 

Ben is a freak, a genetic throwback, a Neanderthal. When he was born into a 'perfect family' in England, the arrival of this weird, often violent little boy alienated and frightened his family and drove them apart. His childhood signified the destruction of the relationships of all those around him. He ended up truanting from school and running away from home, seemingly destined to a life of crime.

But this book is mostly from Ben's perspective. Rather than being afraid of Ben's innate violence, we understand that he is alone and terrified. He is a wild man who doesn't understand human society and certainly doesn't fit in. He is exploited by a variety of men and consoled by a number of women. In this book, the reader learns to empathise with the bogeyman. 

Lessing understands what people mean when they talk to one another, and what they mean when they communicate without words, through tone of voice, posture and the way they look at one another. She understands each of the characters in this story and her writing is so good that the reader is made to understand them too.

The story is narrated from a distance and using multiple third-person perspectives; the plot is driven by the characters and the ending is psychologically inevitable but still gripping.

As a sequel it is very different from the first book but it is utterly complementary in those differences so that the two books make a tragic but coherent whole.

Selected quotes:

• "He was a controlled explosion of furious needs, hungers and frustrations." (p 12)
• "Her education had taught her that truth, scientific truth, was more important than anything else: you could say that her education had as much religion in it as Teresa's." (p 121)
• "the luck without which nothing can succeed, even for brave and resourceful souls." (p 125)
• "Ben was letting out now short choking sounds, but those tears were not spilling out because of a heavy-weighted heart, but because he was too happy to bear it, and he got up and began a stomping dance around the room, letting out short barking roars which the two observers knew meant that a lifetime's sorrow was being dissolved away." (p 126)
• "Not only Ben, but Teresa too, must be feeling oppressed by the rich clever world where people could leap off into air under umbrellas and feel safe, because their lives had always been safe." (p 129)
• "He had not been thinking, and what he had achieved was something so bad he had not begun to measure it." (p 131)
• "The crackling brilliance overhead had moved its patterns, and star shadows had reached out across the bare space." (p 173)

Also by Doris Lessing and reviewed in this blog:

The Golden Notebook

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gumah (2021)

Afterlives

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

"The Changeling" by Victor LaValle

 "A fairy tale moment, the old kind, when such stories were meant for adults, not kids." Set in New York, in which the magical buts up against the mundane. Apollo, seller of rare books, meets librarian Emma; they marry and have a baby called Brian. Then Emma starts to believe that they have a changeling, a creature from myth, not their own baby. Her dreadful reaction, followed by her disappearance, leads means Apollo must travel into mythic and magical realms (within New York) on  a quest whose purpose shifts as we understand more of what is happening.

I thought the first half of the book was brilliant. 

But it was rather like those horror movies in which the tension builds up until you see the monster, at which point it becomes too hard to suspend disbelief. The first half of the book crackled with mystery. The second half was a straightforward adventure story.

The highlight, apart from the episode in which Emma gives birth on a subway train with the help of four break-dancers, was the relationship between Apollo and Patrice "Usually they were the only two black book men at local estate sales. They might as well be two unicorns that happened into the same field. Of course they’d become close." There is a lot of insult trading as in the best buddy movies and Patrice has a fantastic way of anchoring their adventures in reality, such as when the two young men are seeking to break into a cemetery and Patrice points out that in this (white) neighbourhood the police often shoot first, ask questions later. "We can be heroes,’” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”; "Some 'concerned citizen’s' anonymous phone call had killed many a black man before him."

But there were lots of fantastic authorial asides, reflecting on parenting, and the American way of life as seen by a black protagonist in New York City.

But in the end I was terrifically disappointed that a book which promised so much, for so long, dissipated its impact in a fantasy story. 

Selected quotes:

• "Meeting her felt like finding a rose growing in a landfill."
• "They spread wickedness wherever they went."
• "What was waiting on a woman to forgive you compared with having your father beat you up and steal your first paycheck?"
• "In the dark she held his hand. Though they wouldn’t have sex for another three hours, it would be accurate to say their first child—their only child—was conceived right then. A thought, an idea, a shared dream; parenthood is a story two people start telling together."
• "Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child."
• "This was the era of Bernhard Goetz shooting black boys on the subway and many white folks in the city cheering him on. Every kid with excess melanin became a superpredator,"
• "He found a snapshot of the old duo tucked in the pages of a grimoire. They looked like the old man and wife from that movie Up, but this version of Carl and Ellie Fredrickson had been stockpiling volumes of sorcery."
• "Aleister Crowley. A quick check online verified Crowley had been a famed occultist in the early 1900s, called “the wickedest man in history.” Accused of Satanism. A recreational drug user and sexual adventurer back when such a thing was scandalous rather than just a part of one’s online dating profile."
• "When he looked up to greet Apollo, the man’s eyes were lost in a shadow. Since his mouth stayed shrouded in darkness too, it was impossible to see his lips. He looked more ghoulish than gallant."
• "Thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and she looked like a hummingbird that had swallowed an emu egg."
• "Tipsy people are chatty, drunks harangue."
• “'There’s a nude photo of your wife in an art gallery in Amsterdam,' Nichelle said. Is there a proper response to such a revelation? 'Color or black and white?' Apollo asked."
• "Nichelle trailed them by half a block shouting words so slurred they became an invented language."
• "Six weeks was the most time Emma could take off from work before her salary vanished. In the United States this counted as generous."
• "The New Dads. So much better than the Old Dads of the past. New Dads wear their children. New Dads change the baby’s diaper three times a night. New Dads do the dishes and the laundry. New Dads cook the meals. New Dads read the infant development books and do more research online. New Dads apply coconut oil to the baby’s crotch to avoid diaper rash. New Dads bake sweet potatoes, then grind them in the blender once the baby is old enough for solid foods. New Dads carry the diaper bag—really a big old purse—without awareness of shame. New Dads are emotionally available. New Dads do half the housework (really more like 35 percent, but that’s still so much better than zero). New Dads fix all the mistakes the Old Dads made. New Dads are the future, or at least they plan to be, but since they’re making all this shit up as they go along, New Dads are also scared as hell."
• "Apollo brought a frying pan to the stove, poured a capful of olive oil, set the fire, and quickly chopped an onion and garlic clove. He paid inordinate attention to the process in an effort to keep his mouth closed."
• "It was like catching a glimpse of the glittering soul inside a rumpled passenger on a subway train."
• "If our relationships are made of many small lies, they become something larger, a prison of falsehoods."
• "He walked into the kitchen swatting the air, his confusion swarming him like flies."
• "Every human being is a series of stories; it’s nice when someone wants to hear a new one."
• "History isn’t a tale told once, it’s a series of revisions."
• "When I was starting out, you got by on one income, and that was enough, but these days you’ve got to be poor or rich to survive on one income. You want to stay afloat in the middle, and you both are hitting that nine to five.”
• "Vampires can’t come into your house unless you invite them. Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.”
• "Knocking someone unconsciious is incredibly difficult. Apollo wished it was easier."
• "A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”
• “The Scottish called it glamer, ... Glamour. It’s an old kind of magic. An illusion to make something appear different than it really is."
• "No matter the circumstances children are always listening. It can be easy for adults to forget this."
• "He wished, for just a moment, there was an adult present. Lacking one of those, he would have to do."
• "Overcast morning. The snow hadn’t stuck, so the park sagged everywhere, as if a damp blanket had been cast over the land."
• “No one wants to learn their history ... Not all of it. We want our parents to provide but don’t want to know what they had to sacrifice to do it. No nation was ever built with kindness.”
• "You, I know you. One of these special new fathers. You’re going to document every moment, every breath of your child’s life. You take videos of them while they’re sleeping and slap them on the computer before the baby wakes up. You think you’re being so loving. You’ll be a better father than the one who raised you! Or the one who was never there at all. But let me tell you what I see instead. The neediness of it. The begging to be applauded. As if the praise of a thousand strangers would ever make up for the fact that you didn’t feel loved enough as a child."
• "The world is full of glamour, especially when it obscures the suffering of the weak."

The author writes brilliantly and there was so much to enjoy in the first half of the book ... but I felt let down by the second half.

November 2021

• Somewhat strangely, I have just finished The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing which deals with what once might have been thought of as a changeling and its effects on a family in a totally realistic way. I recommend it utterly. 
• Another book about a changeling,  reviewed in this blog, is The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. This time the story involves magical creatures from the start.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"In a House of Lies" by Ian Rankin

 The 22nd Rebus novel!

John Rebus has long retired and has COPD. Ex-sidekick Siobhan Clarke, now a DI, is assigned to investigate the murder of a man whose body has turned up after going missing years ago; the missing person case was investigated by a team that included John Rebus. The baddies include Steele and Edwards, who were also on the original team but are now investigating bent coppers; but are they themselves bent? In fact, who isn't bending the rules? Every officer appears to be compromised in some way, including our heroes.

My biggest criticism of this book was the way in which the final solution was sprung on the reader (though there are some clues). The investigation is bogged down, making pitifully slow progress, the story itself kept going by the inclusion of a sub-plot. Then the soil analysis finally arrives and, following some extraordinarily serendipitous policing involving a chase, the solution arrives. I struggled to find any motive for the accessory. And the criminal? His behaviour during the investigation seemed to me to be totally out of character with his behaviour when the original crime was committed. This stuck-until-you-get-lucky structure may be reflective of real policing but there are certain expectations of a whodunnit which I feel were unfulfilled.

But this is only tangentially a murder mystery. It's really the chronicle of a fascinating group of characters, all of whom have skeletons in their cupboards, and a commentary on corruption and decay in public life.

Selected quotes:

• "Make sure both violence and at least partial nudity appear within the first ten minutes. Fear and desire ... are what drive us." (Ch 11)
• "'What type does Tess go for usually?' 'Sentient'" (Ch 21)
• "George's wallet probably needs WD-40, it opens so seldom." (Ch 21)
• "These days by the time a whisper reached the internet it had become an ill-intentioned and half-formed yelp, a yelp capable of spreading like the more virulent flu bug." (Ch 26)
• "Copy the action of the person opposite and they might begin to sense similarities rather than differences." (Ch 29)
• "Carlton was shaking his head, sniffing and angling his head so no tears would escape." (Ch 50)

This was an enjoyable read but I felt it was unfair to those of us who try to solve the puzzle.

Other Inspector Rebus books reviewed in this blog include:

• A Question of Blood
• The Naming of the Dead
• Strip Jack
• Tooth and Nail: Rebus in London: poor stuff
• Standing in Another Man's Grave
• In a House of Lies

November 2021; 428 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ravenna" by Judith Herrin

Ravenna is a fascinating town. Founded as a safe retreat for the Roman emperors when Rome became vulnerable to barbarian attacks (a little like how Venice was founded as a refuge from later barbarian attacks), and the capital for Theodoric the Gothic king who held it as a more or less independent fief under Constantinople's hegemony it became the centre for the Italian foothold of the Byzantine emperor until it was eventually taken first by the Lombards and later by the Franks under Charlemagne. It thus spent four hundred years being the meeting place for the developing Latinate culture associated with the Roman Catholic papacy and the developing Byzantine culture associated with Constantinople. This culture clash led, as so often, to learning; it was the centre for an important early medieval medical school as well as the city in which Boethius flourished (and later died). 

Famous names kept appearing. As well as those above were Byzantine emperors Justinian, Leo the Iconoclast, and Irene, and others including Belisarius and Stilicho, Pope Gregory the Great , Gerbert of Aurillac and "the famous Queen Radegund" who is presumably the same as the saint celebrated in Canterbury's St Radegund's Car Park.

I found it hard going. As with many books such as this, I found that there was too much information. Ravenna is a fascinating city and there are some compelling personalities but to condense four hundred year into as many pages means that the canvas is overcrowded with incident. This happened and then this and then this; it was history as an overwhelming flood.

Furthermore, sometimes the sequencing seemed awry. For example, in chapter 28 Herrin tells us that the death of Johannicis was "monstrous" (when the emperor who ordered it is deposed) but it is not until chapter 30 that we revisit what happened and find out the manner of the death. I was frequently confused.

But in these books there are always little nuggets. I didn't realise that the Lombards were identified by their long bears (longobardi). Nor did I know that, according to the "Anonymous Cosmographer of Ravenna" "the sun does not hide behind huge mountains during the night, or sink belowe the waters of the Ocean, but returns to its seat in the East ... from Germania and Britannia, via the Baltic islands of the Fini, to the Caucasus, Scythia, Sarmatia and the Caspian Gates to Bactrian India." (Ch 27). And the iconoclasts in 726 were prompted by "a terrifying subaquatic volcanic eruption in the Segean [which] threw up a new island between Thera and Therasia ... [in which] monstrous deposits of ash and solid lava were borne to the shores of the Aegean in a tsunami" (Ch 32)

Selected quotes:

• "The pattern of son following father into the same priestly profession is one common to early medieval Europe; popes Boniface, Felix III and Agapitus were all sons of priests, and Silverius (the short-lived pope of 536-7)was the son of Pope Hormisdas." (Ch 15)
• "Two canons were devoted to appropriate Christian art, the first stipulating the human depiction of Christ rather than his symbolic representation as the Lamb of God, and the second forbidding any artistic representation that might generate improper feelings." (Ch 28)
• "The first Christian icons adopted the same format of small wood panels, similar to the portraits of ancient gods that have survived in the dry conditions of Egypt." (Ch 32)
• "The veneration of images of Christian holy figures ... had always been distinguished from idolatry ... The invisible God could never be represented and was always to be worshipped spiritually." (Ch 32)
• "A particular Byzantine institution, a bride-show ... Officials were duly sent around the empire to find only the most beautiful girls, who had to conform to particular measurements - the Cinderella story of the shoe that fits makes its appearance here." (Ch 36)
• "Irene ... removed her son from power by having him blinded." (Ch 37)

Ultimately I felt that this book failed to do justice to an absolutely fascinating period of history, with the establishment of the Christian church and the early battles for orthodoxy, with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and with the arrival of the Islamic caliphate.

November 2021; 400 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Fifth Child" by Doris Lessing

 A brilliant short novel by an author at the very top of her Nobel-Prize-winning game.

David and Harriet get married, buy a big house, and settle down to have a large family. They have four wonderful children but the fifth is different. Described variously as a goblin, a little troll, a changeling and a Neanderthal, Ben is angry, vicious and educationally backwards. He is suspected of murdering pets; the other children are afraid of him. The unchaptered novel, written in the third person but principally from mother Harriet's point of view and in the past tense, chronicles the devastating effects on the family of such a difficult baby.

My emotions were manipulated into a roller-coaster ride. I was horrified, terrified and made so sad by the plight of this poor family. I empathised with all of them (except Ben) and I understood and accepted all the diverse arguments and points of view.

It is superb. After the first quarter, I found it impossible to put down. 

One of the moist wonderful things about this book is Lessing's use of descriptions which perfectly reflect or foreshadow the action: sympathetic fallacy at its best:

• "They could hardly see each other. Apart from the car lights, and the lights from the building, it was dark. Water squelched under foot." (p 102)
• "No reply. Nothing. A blotch of shadow momentarily dimmed the thin dirty light under the skylight: a bird had passed, on its way from one tree to another." (p 140)

This paragraph contains plot spoilers. The pacing of the novel is perfect. The adult characters are introduced in the first quarter which ends in Harriet's fifth pregnancy. The second quarter describes the nightmare pregnancy and Ben's first year in which he starts attacking animals; it culminates in his first words. In the third quarter Ben is sent away to an institution from where he is 'rescued' by a guilty Harriet; this section ends with Ben being sent to school. In the final quarter the family disintegrates as Ben sinks into delinquency. The book ends with Ben on the cusp of leaving school and Harriet, who realises that her decision to rescue Ben has destroyed her family, wondering what will happen to him now. The story will be continued in the sequel: Ben, in the World.

Selected quotes:

• "There was a forced hecticity to the scene." (p 8)
• "You want things both ways. The aristocracy - yes, they can have children like rabbits, and expect to, but they have the money for it. And poor people can have children, and half of them die, and expect to. But people like us, in the middle, we have to be careful about the children we have so we can look after them." (p 23)
• "There was an ugly edge on events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in England, not one - enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other said." (p 30) The Fifth Child was written in 1988 and this comment in set in 1972.
• "She spoke in a way new to her, as if listening to what she said and afraid of what she might say. ... So do people speak whose thoughts are running along secretly in channels they would rather other people did not know about." (p 65)
• "Four months old ... He was like an angry, hostile little troll." (p 69)

Also read the sequel: Ben, in the World

Lessing also wrote The Golden Notebook

November 2021; 159 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gumah (2021)

Afterlives

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook
The Fifth Child

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

"Psmith, Journalist" by P G Wodehouse

Psmith, whom we first met in Mike and subsequently in Psmith in the City is in New York. Here he becomes a journalist, using a cosy magazine to crusade against poor housing. Unfortunately, this lands him on the wrong side of a corrupt politician who hires a gang to do Psmith in.

The comedy depends on the dialogue. The improbable and farcical situations are disguised as New York slang is contrasted with Psmith's, or the author's whimsy, For example, when Pugsy reflects on his girlfriend ("Aw, she's a kid ... She ain't a bad mutt,' added the ardent swain. 'I'm her steady'."; Ch 25) it is the contrast between the 'ardent swain' and the 'bad mutt' that makes the comedy. Or when Psmith and his editor are on a tenement block roof with would-be assassins below and rival gang members at the door:

"Leave those stiffs on de roof. Let Sam wait here with his canister, and den dey can't get down, 'cos Sam'll pump dem full of lead while dey're beatin' it t'roo de trap-door. Sure'

Psmith nodded reflectively.

'There is certainly something in what the bright boy says.' he murmured. 'It seems to me the grand rescue scene in the third act has sprung a leak.'"

There is a huge reliance on irony, particularly litotes, such as here: "Psmith rose to his feet and dusted his clothes ruefully. For the first time he realised the horrors of war. His hat had gone forever. His trousers could never be the same again after their close acquaintance with the pavement." (Ch 16)

It is a testament to the genius of PGW that he can carry this off for a whole book, though I found it did get a little wearing after a while. Perhaps the charm of Mike, in which Psmith first appears, is that Psmith is much diluted by a 'normal' story; when he is given unbridled rein he exhausts one. One the other hand, Bertie Wooster is fundamentally Psmith in the first person, and that seems to work (although Wooster was often confined to short stories).

Nevertheless, Psmith, Journalist is a refreshingly amusing book. 

There is a description of a boxing match which seems to prophesy Ali's 'rope-a-dope' strategy when fighting Foreman for the World Heavyweight championship in Zaire.

Warning: this book contains racial slurs reflective of the period it was written in.

Selected quotes:

• "One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name." (Ch 5)
• "My idea is that 'Cosy Moments' should become red-hot stuff. I could wish its tone to be such that the public will wonder why we do not print it on asbestos." (Ch 5)
• "Your 'Moments of Mirth' ... have frequently reconciled me to the toothache." (Ch 8)
• "Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what-d'you-call-it." (Ch 25) This echoes two similarly structured reflections on work in the previous book, Psmith in the City.
• "I understand. I am a man of few words myself. All great men are like that." (Ch 25) This is hugely ironic, Psmith's distinguishing characteristic being that he always talks at great length about the most trivial situations.

A farcical plot and classic Wodehouse characters and dialogue. November 202; 221 words

The sequel, Leave it to Psmith, is set in Blandings Castle

Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Psmith in the City" by P G Wodehouse

 The sequel to Mike (also known as two books: Mike at Wrykyn and Mike and Psmith). Mike Jackson, born cricketer, hoped to go to Cambridge but his father has fallen on hard times so Mike is sent to earn his living in a London bank. Psmith turns up. Neither of them actually enjoy the work (P G Wodehouse briefly and unhappily worked for a bank after leaving Dulwich College) but Psmith lightens the load with his long facetious monologues. Various loosely structured adventures occur culminating in a cricket match at Lords.

This book is most notable for the development of the character of Psmith, although Mike is still the protagonist and most of the third-person-omniscient narration is done from Mike's point of view.

Selected quotes

• "Where Psmith stood like some dignified piece of sculpture, musing on deep questions with a glassy eye, his father would be trying to be in four places at once." (C 1)
• "Psmith's attitude towards the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune was to regard them with a bland smile, as if they were part of an entertainment got up for his express benefit." (C 3)
• "London was too big to be angry with. It took no notice of him. It did not care whether he was glad to be there or sorry, and there was no means of making it care. That is the peculiarity of London. There is a sort of cold unfriendliness about it. A city like New York makes the new arrival feel at home in half an hour; but London is a specialist in what Psmith in his letter had called the Distant Stare. You have to buy London's good-will." (C 3)
• "I can rough it. We are old campaigners, we Psmiths. Give us a roof, a few comfortable chairs, a sofa or two, half a dozen cushions, and decent meals, and we do not repine." (C 8)
• "Work, the hobby of the philosopher and the poor man's friend." (C 8)
• "Work, the hobby of the hustler and the deadbeat's dread." (C 8)
• "The curiously Gorgonzolaesque marble of its main staircase" (C 9)
• "Rumours have reached me,' said Psmith, 'that a very decent little supper may be obtained at a quaint, old-world eating-house called the Savoy." (C 0)
• "He was a man who had, I should say, discovered that alcohol was a food long before the doctors found it out." (C 11)
• "At any moment I may fall from my present high standard of industry and excellence; and then you have me, so to speak, where the hair is crisp." (C 12)
• "It was part of Psmith's philosophy that a man who wore detachable cuffs had passed beyond the limit of human toleration." (C 14)
• "Mike proceeded to the meeting with the air of an about-to-be-washed dog." (C 15)
• "Sunday supper, unless done on a large and informal scale, is probably the most depressing meal in existence." (C 17)
• "If one looks closely into those actions which are apparently due to sudden impulse, one generally finds that the sudden impulse was merely the last of a long series of events which led up to the action." (C 25)
• "You have the manner of one whose only friend on earth is a yellow dog, and who has lost the dog." (C 25)
• "Possibly, if the weather continues warm, we may even paddle. A vastly exhilarating pastime, I am led to believe, and so strengthening for the ankles." (C 25)

November 2021

Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Mike" by P G Wodehouse

This novel was originally published in serial form and has since been republished in a variety of forms, including as two novels: Mike at Wrykyn and Mike and Psmith. It is an example of the very early work of P G Wodehouse and shows him transitioning from the school-based story genre to the comic novel based around eccentric aristocrats. Psmith, who makes his first appearance in the second half of this novel, was, perhaps, his first 'Woosterish' character (though Psmith has brains), although the character of Wyatt, who appears in the first half of this novel, is very much Psmith in embryo.

The book divides into two very separate halves: 

• In the first half, Michael Jackson, the eponymous hero, is a keen cricketer (he has three brothers who play first-class cricket) who goes to public school Wrykyn with the ambition of making the First Eleven in his first term. 
• In the second half, Mike has been taken from Wrykyn just before becoming captain of Cricket and, because of bad reports, is sent to Sedleigh, a much smaller school with a much smaller reputation in cricket. Sulking, he decides he won't play cricket for Sedleigh. 

The style shows clear indications of what PGW will become. His authorial voice is already there:

• There are the authorial reflections, with a twist of wryness:
• "And here, I regret to say, Mike acted from the best motives, which is always fatal." (C 2)
• "Influential relations are a help in every stage of life." (C 4)
• "No man of spirit can bear to be pelted with over-ripe tomatoes for any length of time without feeling that if the thing goes on much longer he will be reluctantly compelled to take steps." (C 8)
• "The true philosopher is the man who says “All right,” and goes to sleep in his arm-chair." (C 22)
• There are the reinterpreted metaphors:
• "Rather like crushing a thingummy with a what-d’you-call-it." (C 14)
• "He paced up and down the room like a hungry lion, adjusting his pince-nez (a thing, by the way, which lions seldom do)" (C 19)
• "With a strong hand she had shaken the cat out of the bag, and exhibited it plainly to all whom it might concern." (C 21)
• There are utterly original descriptions:
• "The whole business had some of the dignity of the old-fashioned minuet, subtly blended with the careless vigour of a cake-walk." (C 40)

There are even hints of characters in later novels. For example, Mike says that before Wrykyn he was at a private school "at Emsworth" which foreshadows Lord Emsworth, the hero of the Blandings Castle saga.

Both halves resonate with the public school ethos of the age. On the one hand, it reeks of privilege. The boys live in a protected bubble; the lower classes are subservient. Even when the village policeman is thrown into the pond, the headmaster is fundamentally complacent.

On the other hand, it is fascinating to see how things have developed. This is a time before toothpaste: "Push us over a pinch of that tooth-powder of yours. I’ve used all mine.” (C 23) The googly is still new and unnamed: "my friend said he had one very dangerous ball, of the Bosanquet type. Looks as if it were going away, and comes in instead.” (C 27)

Some words are in early stages of their development:

• There is an interesting use of the word 'stereo' (unacknowledged in my Chambers) as a shortening of stereotyped to describe the conventional conversation around the breakfast table in the Jackson household.
• One doesn't 'oversleep', one 'oversleeps oneself'.
• “I simply sha’n’t go to school.” (C 9)
• “Nothing that happens in this luny-bin,” said Psmith, “has power to surprise me" (C 46)

Selected quotes:

• "Except during the cricket season they were in the habit of devoting their powerful minds at breakfast almost exclusively to the task of victualling against the labours of the day." (C 1)
• "He had the same feeling for Mike that most boys of eighteen have for their fifteen-year-old brothers. He was fond of him in the abstract, but preferred him at a distance." (C 1)
• "An entirely modest person seldom makes a good batsman. Batting is one of those things which demand first and foremost a thorough belief in oneself. It need not be aggressive, but it must be there." (C 4)
• "There is nothing more heady than success, and if it comes before we are prepared for it, it is apt to throw us off our balance. As a rule, at school, years of wholesome obscurity make us ready for any small triumphs we may achieve at the end of our time there." (C 5)
• "when Mike was pleased with life he always found a difficulty in obeying Authority and its rules." (C 5)
• "I often say to people, ’Good chap, Trevor, but can’t think of Life. Give him a tea-pot and half a pound of butter to mess about with,’ I say, ’and he’s all right. But when it comes to deep thought, where is he? Among the also-rans.’ That’s what I say.” (C 17)
• "The first duty of a captain is to have no friends." (C 20)
• "There are many kinds of walk. Mike’s was the walk of the Overwrought Soul." (C 20)
• "Marjory meant well, but she had put her foot right in it. Girls oughtn’t to meddle with these things. No girl ought to be taught to write till she came of age. And Uncle John had behaved in many respects like the Complete Rotter. If he was going to let out things like that, he might at least have whispered them, or looked behind the curtains to see that the place wasn’t chock-full of female kids." (C 21)
• “if I cannot compel circumstances to my will, I can at least adapt my will to circumstances." (C 22)
• "it’s awful rot for a chap like Wyatt to have to go and froust in a bank for the rest of his life.” (C 26)
• "I’ve just become a Socialist. It’s a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it." (C 32)
• “Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” said he, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’" (C 33)
• "The advice I give to every young man starting life is: ‘Never confuse the unusual and the impossible.’" (C 33)
• "He walked well, as if he were used to running." (C 36)
• "He positively ached for a game. Any sort of a game. An innings for a Kindergarten v. the Second Eleven of a Home of Rest for Centenarians would have soothed him." (C 37)
• "The ball, when delivered, was billed to break from leg, but the programme was subject to alterations." (C 40)
• "Of all masters, the most unpopular is he who by the silent tribunal of a school is convicted of favouritism." (C 40)
• "Jellicoe, for the latter carolled in a gay undertone as he dressed, till Psmith, who had a sensitive ear, asked as a favour that these farm-yard imitations might cease until he was out of the room." (C 42)
• "Mr. Downing was in a sarcastic mood when he met Mike. That is to say, he began in a sarcastic strain. But this sort of thing is difficult to keep up. By the time he had reached his peroration, the rapier had given place to the bludgeon." (C 42)
• “One of the Georges,” said Psmith, “I forget which, once said that a certain number of hours’ sleep a day—I cannot recall for the moment how many—made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I’ve given you the main idea of the thing" (C 44)
• "There had been a time in his hot youth when he had sprinted like an untamed mustang in pursuit of volatile Pathans in Indian hill wars, but Time, increasing his girth, had taken from him the taste for such exercise." (C 45)
• "it was this that made him feel that somebody, in the words of an American author, had played a mean trick on him, and substituted for his brain a side-order of cauliflower." (C 58)

A fascinating glimpse of early Wodehouse, already funny.

The next book in the series is Psmith in the City.

Other books by P G Wodehouse reviewed in this blog can be found here.

November 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"I, Claudius" by Robert Graves

When is a novel not a novel? On the whole, I dislike rules. They tend to become rigid. When Christopher Booker postulates that there are Seven Basic Plots his thesis becomes so fossilised that he dismisses James Joyce's Ulysses as an inadequate story. The definition Jane Smiley uses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel is that a novel is "a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” By this definition, I, Claudius is clearly a novel. And yet I felt there was some key ingredient lacking.

I, Claudius is a retelling of the story of the first three emperors of Rome, as narrated by the fourth, Claudius. It is fundamentally a fictionalised history and, as such, is limited by the need to follow the facts. And as historian Arnold Toynbee said in 1957: "History is just ‘one damned thing after another’". This meant that the narrative, covering fifty incident-packed years, was immensely cluttered with details and events and anecdotes, and I lost any sense of pattern or theme. Characters came and went (often being put to death) so fast that I found it very difficult to empathise with any of them. Perhaps inevitably, given the scope of the book, the narrative distance was far off, like a long (far too long!) establishing shot in a film, and this further reduced my ability to empathise. Finally, the first person narration meant that what focus existed was on Claudius so the subsidiary characters became mere puppets. Lots of people died but it didn't affect me because I didn't care for any of them.

As Claudius says of another historian: "He had no critical sense and wrote miserably, the facts choking each other like flowers in a seed-bed that has not been thinned out." (Ch 5)

This changed in the last few chapters which deal with the assassination of Caligula. Here the pace slowed down, the focus became much closer, and I started to get involved. But that was the exception.

There are other moments through the book when the focus becomes close and individual conversations are reported and they stood out like cherries in stodge (even if one of them was a somewhat academic discussion of the nature of history).

It made me wonder how Tolstoy managed to get people involved with his characters in War and Peace and I think that his secret was to have a small core cast of characters, a third person 'omniscient' narrator, and to tell his story (even the battle) almost entirely through close focus scenes. 

In short, I didn't think I' Claudius worked as a novel and I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. 

Selected quotes:

• "Others prophesy, indeed, but seem more inspired by Bacchus than by Apollo, the drunken nonsense they deliver" (Ch 1)
• "With riches came sloth, greed, cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, effeminacy, and every other un-Roman vice." (Ch 1)
• "Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus." (Ch 2)
• "She had a faculty for making ordinary easy-going people feel acutely conscious in her presence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings." (Ch 3)
• "The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again." (Ch 3)
• "He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about." (Ch 5)
• "The Empire was very big and needed more officials and senior army officers than the nobility and gentry were able to supply, in spite of constant recruiting to their ranks from the populace. When there were complaints from men of family about the vulgarity of these newcomers, Augustus used to answer testily that he chose the least vulgar he could find." (Ch 7)
• "The cleverest leader is one who chooses clever people to think for him." (Ch 7)
• "You can always tell a Paduan. By bathing in the water of the spring or drinking it – and I’m told that they do both things simultaneously – Paduans are able to believe whatever they like and believe it so strongly that they can make anyone else believe it. That’s how the city has got such a wonderful commercial reputation." (Ch 9)
• "There are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth." (Ch 9)
• "The tax-collector exercised his right of seizing good-looking children from the villages which could not pay and carrying them off to be sold as slaves." (Ch 11)
• "To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration." (Ch 12)
• "As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned." (Ch 22)
• "My mother had always been very economical, and in her old age her chief delight was saving candle-ends and melting them down into candles again, and selling the kitchen refuse to pig-keepers, and mixing charcoal-dust with some liquid or other and kneading it into cakes which, when dried, burned almost as well as charcoal." (Ch 27)
• "All theatre-pieces are much the same except to connoisseurs" (Ch 30)
• "Mad, Caesar? You ask whether I think you Mad? Why, you set the standard of sanity for the whole habitable world." (Ch 32)
• "‘It’s a very difficult thing, you know, Claudius,’ he said confidentially, ‘to be a God in human disguise'." (Ch 32)

November 2021

As a history of Rome it reminded me of Livy's Early History of Rome which is full of exhausting detail. If you want to read about the Roman emperors read Suetonius The Twelve Caesars or the brilliant Dynasty by Tom Holland.

I, Claudius, together with its sequel, Claudius, the God, won the 1934 James Tait Black memorial prize. 

Other reviews:

• Annie on goodreads described it as an "endless, joyless recitation of facts and events"
• Peter on goodreads says that "Robert Graves does a great literary impersonation of a rambling bore"
• Taka on goodreads calls it "432 pages of dense and complicated Roman history, 98% of which is told in a narrative instead of rendered in scene".
• lethe on goodreads described it as "all telling, not showing"
• Isaac Cooper on goodreads abandoned it. "The marriages, cousins, uncles, wives, divorces, conspiracies and characters are shot at you one after the other. ... Claudius recounts the various exploits of Rome like he’s merely ticking off a checklist."

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God