"Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier

"Last night I dream I went to Manderley again" is the first line of this book, made famous by being the first (voiceover) line of the Hitchcock film (which, being made just two years after the book's publication, and starring Laurence Olivier, and winning the Oscar for Best Picture, was probably responsible for the book's enormous success but has subsequently coloured many people's reading of the book). 

The novel is narrated by the never-named protagonist (all we are told, in chapter 4, is that she has "a very lovely and unusual name") in the first-person, past-tense. It is introduced (it's a sort of framing device, excpet that in the end we don't return to the frame) by her living abroad in a hotel with a man for whom she cares. She tells her story. As an orphaned young companion to a wonderfully spiteful old woman, she is staying in Monte Carlo when she meets Maxim de Winter. They fall in love and marry; he then takes her back to England where he lives in Manderley, a stately home. She finds it difficult to assume the role of chatelaine of the manor, especially since she has stepped into the shoes of the first Mrs de Winter, the eponymous Rebecca, a woman whom, it seems, the servants and the local community adored; the narrator assumes her new husband is still in thrall to his deceased first wife. Rebecca's shadow hangs heavily over the house, there are even suggestions that her ghost haunts it. There is tremendous conflict, especially from Mrs Danvers, the uber-competent housekeeper, who is still in mourning for the dead Rebecca. And there is a mystery about how Rebecca died.

The book is powered by the character of the narrator. She is an imaginative woman and this leads her to imagine what people are thinking and sometimes her assumptions are wrong, leading her into wonderful faux pas. She is also, at least in the first part of the book, hugely intimidated by the servants, leading her to do things like concealing little mistakes she makes. But when the chips are down, she becomes a tower of strength, powered by her love. (This character arc reminded me of that of the easily-bullied protagonist of my novel The Kids of God, although that takes a rather darker and, I think, more realistic turn.)

The first chapter provides the hook and acts as a sort of prologue or a framing device (without, however a corresponding epilogue to complete the frame).  The narrator has a dream of her past life; presently she is living with an unnamed male companion in a sort of exile. Then she starts remembering what happened and the next sixth of the book describes how Prince Charming meets Cinderella while Cinderella's employer provides the ugly stepmother who seeks to prevent the blossoming romance. 

The next part of the book, the main part, is a classic Gothic novel. Cinderella becomes the Damsel in Distress, transported to the Big House, whose West Wing is disused. Prince Charming is now the Brooding Hero-with-a-Mysterious-Past and the Housekeeper (described at first sight as "tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull's face, parchment white, set on a skeleton's frame" Ch 7) is the villain who has the Damsel in her power (though this is topsy-turvy in that the Damsel technically employs the villain). The half-ruined house, isolated in a brooding landscape (all those bloody rhododendrons!) is haunted by the memories of Rebecca: there is the classic Gothic trope of the past infecting and contaminating the present. There's even a mad peasant on the seashore who makes cryptic comments which the reader just knows must be crucial to the plot!

Then comes the final quarter of the book which is almost a thriller.

At the heart of the novel, there is a wonderful set piece: the fancy dress balll. It is one of those moments when the reader is ahead of the narrator and understands exactly what the consequences will be. Du Maurier takes her time building up the suspense,  putting in delay after delay: I was reading this section as fast as I could. It was glorious. It is also characteristically Gothic: Ann Radcliffe, who wrote A Sicilian Romance, amongst many other books, suggested that terror was created by suspense.

There is some very cleverly constructed dialogue. In a number of scenes, when there is a secret of which some of the participants are unaware, the conversation is wonderfully one-sided. The innocent blather on about trivialities (the weather, social issues) and sometimes tangentially refer to the secret they don't know, while those in on the secret are restricted to replying almost in monosyllables, eg "'Yes,' I said." This device is repeated several times and works very well.

Like in her novel Jamaica Inn, Du Maurier milks the pathetic fallacy to the max. The weather in Cornwall always seems to mirror the narrator's mood, whether providing sun or (far more frequently) rain and, when needed, mist. Nevertheless, du Maurier gets away with this because of the brilliance of her descriptions of the countryside in all its meteorological moods. In her dream at the opening of the book, the narrator imagines a Manderley without its gardeners, where the tamed nature surrounding it has grown wild and reclaimed it; this is a trope of Gothic fiction.

The only bit that slightly let the novel down, I thought, was the rather over melodramatic scene in which the housekeeper, now apparently a madwoman, tries to persuade the narrator to jump out of the window. But all the best Gothic novels have moments of melodrama. 

Jane Eyre

The parallels between Rebecca and Jane Eyre are obvious. An orphaned young girl with little social standing meets a wealthy man haunted by his past. He proposes. In JE the marriage is interrupted by the news that the first wife is still alive; in Rebecca they marry but the early days of the marriage are haunted by the memories of the first wife. In the end, after the stately home has burned down, the protagonist becomes carer for the physically (JE) or mentally (R) crippled man.

Maxim de Winter
Maxim de Winter, the Prince Charming/ Man with a Past, is  what E M Forster in Aspects of the Novel describes as a ‘flat’ character. Perhaps DdM realised the contradictions inherent in such a character: he is the man who married foolishly and then permitted his first wife to be as unfaithful as she liked until he believed that she had cuckolded him and Manderley, the real love of his life, would be inherited by a bastard at which point he killed and covered up the murder. Then he buggered off to Monte Carlo and (guiltless?) married again, this time to a woman half his age whom he treats as a child. Swanning back home he almost disappears from the pages of the book until he confesses to his new wife that he has murdered his first. Seemingly unafraid of him, she now contrives to cover up his crime, virtually without his help, until they go abroad and he is reduced to a helpless shell of a man. It would be difficult to portray such a man as a ‘round’ character. He is more of a plot device than a character. Some of the book group members suggested that he was a villain and that maybe he exercised coercive control over the 2nd Mrs deW, but it seems to me that he is a helpless victim of his position in the caste system and the responsibilities imposed upon him as owner of Manderley (and the wickednesses of Rebecca and the ongoing schemes of Mrs Danvers whose first act in the book is to marshall the servants in direct opposition to his orders); it is Rebecca and Mrs Danvers who are the villains and it is they who exercise coercive control (and Mrs Danvers also gaslights the narrator).

Is Mrs Danvers in love with Rebecca?
Did Mrs Danvers have a sapphic desire for Rebecca. There is a key scene (ch 14) where the narrator goes to Rebecca’s room in the west wing and is discovered there by Mrs Danvers. Mrs Danvers says: “That was her bed. It’s a beautiful bed, isn’t it? ... Here is her nightdress ... You’ve been touching it, haven’t you? ... Would you like to touch it again? ... Feel it, hold it ... I haven’t washed it since she wore it for the last time ... this is her dressing gown ... Put it up against you ... She had a beautiful figure ... Put your hands inside her slippers.” It’s quite creepy. It is certainly possible to read a (one-sided and latent, unreciprocated) lesbian infatuation into that. 

Another suggestion was that the narrator and Rebecca are mirror images. In the Ch 14 scene, the narrator actually sees herself in Rebecca’s dressing-table mirror, and of course in the pivotal fancy-dress ball the narrator is duped into dressing up exactly as Rebecca had a tear before. In other ways, however, they are contrasts. The narrator is smaller than Rebecca was and has limp hair. The narrator comes from a social class that hasn’t been bred to run a stately home. And, of course,the narrator is in love with, and faithful to, her husband.

Miscellaneous points:

• The poetry book given by Rebecca to Maxim falls open at The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.
• The medicine Taxol, which Mrs Van Hopper takes in the book, was an effervescent salt similar to Eno's; Taxol is now the brand name for an anti-cancer drug which hadn't been discovered when Rebecca was written.

Major turning points (spoiler alert):

• Max asks the narrator to marry him 15% of the way through the book. In a delightful foreshadowing, she is eating a sour tangerine which leaves a bad taste in her mouth.
• They arrive at Manderley at the 17% mark.
• Narrator discovers Rebecca's room in the West Wing: 25%
• Beatrice explains about Mrs D: 27%
• Narrator discovers the cottage in the cove: 30%
• Narrator meets Jack, one of the villains: 42%
• Mrs Danvers suggests a costume for the fancy dress ball: 53%
• The costume creates a sensation: 57%
• The scene in which a hysterical Mrs D tries to persuade the narrator to jump out of the window: 65%
• Maxim explains what happened to Rebecca: 71%
• They find out about the doctor: 92%

Selected quotes:

• "A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils around the pair and made them prisoners."  (Ch 1) A dreamed metaphor for Mr and the second Mrs de Winter trapped by the malevolent ghost of Rebecca?
• "We can never go back, that much is certain." (Ch 2)
• "Not a single well-known personality. I shall tell the management they must make a reduction on my bill. What do they think I come here for? To look at the page boys?" (Ch 2)
• "I could tell by the way the sauce ran down her chin that her dish of ravioli pleased her." (Ch 2)
• "I remember a well-known writer once who used the dart down the Service staircase whenever he saw me coming. I suppose he had a penchant for me and wasn't sure of himself." (Ch 3)
• "They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word." (Ch 5)
• "The past had blown away like the ashes in the waste-paper basket." (Ch 6)
• "I was not sure what he meant by modesty. It was a word I had never understood. I always imagined it had something to do with minding meeting people in a passage on the way to a bathroom ..." (Ch 11)
• "I had been selfish and hyper-sensitive, a martyr to my own inferiority complex." (Ch 11)
• "I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone." (Ch 13)
• "He went on looking me up and down in his amused way with those familiar, unpleasant blue eyes. I felt like a barmaid." (Ch 13)
• "Now that I knew her to have been evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more. She could not hurt me." (Ch 21)
• "Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows born, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed." (Ch 26)

October 2023; 302 pages

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

"The Bell" by Iris Murdoch

 I read this book many years ago and I had remembered very little.

It is set in a sort of commune of Christians who live in a posh country house in the middle of the countryside (Swindon seems to be the nearest town) and support themselves by running a market garden and are 'attached' to a local convent which contains an enclosed and unviewable order of nuns. They are gearing up for the presentation of a new bell to the convent to replace the one that was lost in the middle ages. The discovery of the old bell, whose tolling is said to portend a death, is the turning point in the centre of the novel. 

The story is told (in third person, past tense) from the points of view of Dora (described as a "child-wife"; Ch1: echoes of Dora in David Copperfield?), a flighty young woman who is returning to her husband after leaving him, Toby, a sexually innocent eighteen-year-old who is spending his summer holidays helping out at the community prior to going up to university, and Michael, the leader of the community, a closet homosexual. Other major characters include Paul, Dora's bullying and controlling husband, James, the strait-laced number two in the community, gossipy Mrs Mark, and alcoholic Nick, a figure from Michael's past. Nick's twin sister Catherine plays an important part at the end of the plot which I didn't think was fully justified given her shadowy presence earlier. The mostly off-stage Abbess is a sort of cross between a wise-woman and a witch (specifically from Macbeth, at one stage she quotes the line about "when the hurly-burly's done").

The theme of the novel is the disruption that life, specifically sexual urges, can bring to the religious life; it it the age-old battle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Dora who flip-flops between her husband and a slightly camp but heterosexual journalist is the frame story but the meat of the argument concerns the ins-and-outs of homosexuality. 

It was published in 1958 (a year after the Wolfenden report recommended decriminalising homosexuality) and seems extraordinarily dated. There is the use of the phrase "working like a black" (Ch 11). The word 'gay' means happy and care-free. Dora never seriously considers divorce, despite the obvious cruelty of her husband. The music is either jazz or classical. The innocence of eighteen year old Toby is stunning: there may still be eighteen year old male virgins but I can't imagine that anyone nowadays will be so naive about their sexuality. Toby also regrets having been a day pupil at school; it's seen as unusual. The campness of the journalist is because of the way he talks which was probably merely seen as sophisticated in those times; he also knows the Bishop from the Athenaeum. 

This datedness shows most in the arguments over homosexuality. Michael was seduced aged fourteen at school and had two "intense" affairs there; subsequently, as a teacher, he is dismissed for his homosexual flirtation with a pupil and the dismissal is covered-up so he can go on to teach elsewhere. Nowadays we wouldn't bat an eye at the homosexuality but there would be shock and horror at what would be regarded as paedophilic child sex abuse. But Murdoch is obviously sincere in trying to 'normalise' homosexual affection despite the condemnation of 'sodomy' by the strait-laced James. But it is clear that homosexuality is regarded as a major perversion, both by Michael, who sees it as a vice or weakness he must suppress, a sin which destroys any chance he has of becoming a priest, something which is incompatible with his religion ("For a creature such as himself the service of God must means a loss of personality ... or the surrender of will in an unquestioing obedience"; Ch 6; "God had created men and women with these tendencies, and made those tendencies to run so deep that they were, in many cases, the very core of the personality. ... God had made him so and he did not think that God had made him a monster."; Ch 16), and by Toby who, following the shocked realisation that Michael fancies him, fears he might be 'like that'. This implied enormity of homosexuality is at odds with any attempt to make it seem like a natural part of life: at the end Michael regrets that Toby has been sent away from the community because it means Toby might make more of what happened than he should: "almost any other way of closing the incident would have been better than this one." (Ch 25)

The weakness of the novel is that the dialogue is rather artificially constructed. It's a bit like listening to the arguments for and against a proposition at a university debating society. This is a novel of ideas and sometimes the ideas intrude. The strength of the novel is the care which Murdoch lavishes on constructing her characters; even the least important have a bit of back-story. These people may seem rather strange - giving up the world for a life of service, subjugating their sexuality to an imported moral code - but they are ordinary (if determinedly upper-middle-class). 

It has a good hook The first line is "Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason." The plot is perfectly paced: the first narrative switch, from Dora to Michael, comes around the 25% mark; the bell is found half-way through the novel; the second-half is more action-packed than the first and towards the end the twists come thick and fast. 

But how I hate books that use foreign phrases. Is the reader expected to know them? Or is the author showing off?

• "une jeune fille un peu folle" = a slightly crazy young girl. Is the English so much less posh? It certainly communicates better to English readers.
• "etourderies" = thoughtlessnesses
• "fou rire" = crazy laugh
• "malgre eux" = despite themselves
• "Quarens me, sedisti lassus; Redemisti, Crucem passus; Tantus labor non sit cassus." = Seeking me, you rested, weary; You redeemed [me], having suffered the Cross; do not let such efforts be in vain. It's a quote from the Dies Irae section of the Requiem Mass. Perhaps, in those days, everyone knew their Latin. Nevertheless, even then, a footnote translation might have been in order.
  

On the other hand I quite enjoyed the fact that Toby repeatedly used his favourite word of the moment (rebarbative) even though I had to look it up. It means unattractive to the point of being objectionable. I don't mind having to look up English words; it seems to me that I ought to know them. But foreignisms? No. (And yes, I know that in my novel Motherdarling Jack who has lived in Paris uses a whole paragraph of untranslated French but I think the reader can guess that he is using a lot of rude words.)

There's a lovely metaphor when the dog is in the punt and literally rocks the boat (Ch 10) ... as if the humans aren't doing that all the time. And there are repeated references to 'bell' (eg "as clear as a bell"; Ch10; "he heard the hand bell ringing the Angelus"; Ch 10)

Selected quotes:

• "It seemed to her that Paul was urging her to grow up, and yet had left her no space to grow up into." (Ch 1)
• "That was marriage, through Dora; to be enclosed in the aims of another." (Ch 1)
• "Youth is a marvellous garment." (Ch 1) 
• "How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life" (Ch 1)
• "It's the curse of modern life that people don't have real trades any more. A man is his work. In the old days we were all butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers, weren't we?" (Ch 1)
• "The hedges, rotund with dusty foliage, bulged over the edge of the road." (Ch 2)
• "She now made out with an unpleasant shock a shapeless pile of squatting black cloth that must be a nun." (Ch 2)
• "She had retained her prejudices when she lost her religion." (Ch 2)
• "She looked back at him, uneasy, yet admiring the solidity of him, full to the brim with his love and his work and all his certainty about life. She felt flimsy and ephemeral by comparison, as if she were merely a thought in his mind." (Ch 3)
• "Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality." (Ch 9)
• "Like all inexperienced people, Toby tended to make all-or-nothing judgements." (Ch 12)
• "Dora disliked any music in which she could not participate herself by singing or dancing." (Ch 15)
• "She listened now with distaste to the hard patterns of sound which plucked at her emotions without satisfying them and which demanded in an arrogant way to be contemplated." (Ch 15) The music in question is Bach.
• "He envied his medieval prototype who at least did not have to deal with both his lady and the adventure at the same time. For most of the operation Dora was useless." (Ch 17)
• "He remembered the souls in Dante who deliberately remained within the purifying fire. Repentance: to think about sin without making the thought into a consolation." (Ch 26)
• "There is a God, but I do not believe in him." (Ch 26)

October 2023; 329 pages

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

"The Changeling" by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

 This play was probably first performed in 1622 and is often regarded as Middleton's best play (Rowley is thought to have written the first and last scenes and the 'madhouse' subplot). Middleton may have collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens.

Spoiler alert: the paragraph below describes the whole plot

Alsemero, visiting Vermandero's castle in Valencia, Alicante, Spain, falls in love with the daughter of the house, Beatrice (also sometimes called Joanna). She falls for him which is awkward since her father has engaged her to marry another man, Alonzo de Piracquo. So B-J commissions Vermandero's servant Deflores, a man she cannot otherwise stand, to murder her betrothed. Because he is in love with her, he agrees to do this. But afterwards he is offended when she seeks to pay him. He doesn't want her money, he wants her maidenhead. Reluctantly, she agrees. Deflores deflowers her. Then, realising that Alsemero might discover she isn't a virgin on their wedding night, B-J persuades her maid Diaphanta (also a maid) to sleep with Alsemero in her place - a version of the 'bed-trick' - which Diaphanta eagerly agrees to do because she fancies Alsemero. Afterwards, B-J is jealous and persuades Deflores to murder Diaphanta. In the showdown, the AdP's brother demands to know what has happened to AdP (who has disappeared). Initial investigations offer up two servants who have been hiding in a local madhouse (because they want to have sex with the madhouse keeper's wife - this is the comedy subplot) but then Deflores confesses, implicating Diaphanta. They are locked in a closet from which are heard groans. Are they having sex? No, they are stabbing one another to death.

Production:

I saw this play performed by the Lazarus company at the Southwark Playhouse on Saturday (matinee) 7th October 2023. It was a tremendous production, in the round, with superb performances from Alex Bird playing Alonzo, Jamie O'Neill playing Deflores, Henrietta Rhodes playing a superbly sexy and saucy Diaphanta, and Colette O'Rourke playing Beatrice Joanna. The lighting, sound and effects worked perfectly. It included three songs (Mikko Juan had a brilliant voice) which replaced the sub-plot of the lunatics; otherwise (except for some necessary alterations consequent upon the gender swap of Vermandero to Vermandera and the addition of one or two modern words) the text was fully respected. My full review is here.

The dating of the play:

• It refers to the Battle of Gibraltar between the Spanish and the "rebellious Hollanders" (1.1) which was in 1607; it therefore post-dates this. 
• The testing of Beatrice-Joanna's virginity probably refers to the scandal involving Frances Howard (whose virginity was examined prior to her being allowed to annul her marriage to her first husband on the grounds of non-consummation) and Robert Carr; they were 'in the news' when they were imprisoned in 1616 (for murdering Sir Thomas Overbury) and again when they were released from imprisonment in 1622.
• Middleton was buried in 1627, so the play must pre-date that.

Selected quotes:

"We have but two sorts of people in the house ... that's fools and madmen - the one has not wit enough to be knaves, and the other not knavery enough to be fools." (1.2)

"Every part has his hour: we wake at six and look about us, that's eye-hour; at seven we should pray, that's knee-hour; at eight walk, that's leg-hour; at nine gather flowers and pluck a rose, that's nose-hour; at ten we drink, that's mouth-hour; at eleven lay about us for victuals, that's hand-hour; at twelve go to dinner' that's belly-hour." (1.2)

"A capcase for one's conscience." (3.3)

"Do you place me in the rank of verminous fellows

To destroy things for wages?" (3.3)

"You forget yourself:

A woman dipped in blood and talk of modesty?" (3.3)

"Look but into your conscience, read me there -

'Tis a true book, you'll find me there your equal.

Push! Fly not to your birth, but settle you

Into what the act has made you, you're no more now;

You must forget your parentage to me -

You're the deed's creature." (3.3)

"Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose?" (3.3)

"Murder, I see, is followed by more sins." (3.3)

It's certainly easier to understand on a first reading than a typical Shakespeare: the language is less convoluted, perhaps. The scansion of the iambic pentameters may have worked with the pronunciation of the day but there are many occasions when it doesn't work today; the verse seems more blank than free.

October 2023

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

"Rabbit, Run" by John Updike

The first in a tetralogy, written once every ten years, featuring Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom. The sequels are Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest.

This is a chronicle of a mid-life crisis, experienced early. When Harry Angstrom was at high school, he was a basketball star who achieved record scores. Now (1959), aged 26, he has a job demonstrating a kitchen appliance at department stores. Returning home one night, he discovers his pregnant alcoholic wife watching TV: she tells him to pick his car up from When he's asked to pick their two-year-old son up from his mother's and the car from her mother's. He collects the car and drives south and west all night. Next morning he returns to his hometown but not to his wife. Quitting his job he shacks up with another woman. Can Harry be persuaded to return to his wife and, if he does, what will be the consequences.

It's a more-or-less honest portrait of a man who is disillusioned with life: "after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate." (p 92); "What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots." (p 232). But as the author says in an afterword: "Jack Kerouac's On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose. Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road - the people left behind get hurt." As Reverend Eccles tells Harry: "Right and wrong aren't dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably ... misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often not at first our own." (p 240)

Rabbit is on the run from the realities of life after the first bloom of youth. "The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks." (p 194) Getting old sucks, and Rabbit, unable to come to terms with this, runs. But he doesn't know where he's going. Other men, perhaps acting the part of the wise sage encountered on the journey, give him advice. "The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there." (p 26) he is told, early on. Later: "All vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first." (p 110) Nevertheless, he can't settle down.

In part, the book is about the relations between the sexes. Sex and marital infidelity are frankly reported (though it is by no means explicit, judging by today's standards). Rabbit, as the nickname suggests, uses women: he abandons his wife and persuades another woman to have sex with him for money; he slaps the vicar's wife on the bottom; he sees sex as a biological relief, trying to penetrate his wife days after she has given birth. He is, according to an obstetrician "just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he [the obstetrician] spends his life trying to harvest." (p 173) But the reader is made aware of the fundamental misogyny of the protagonist (and other men). Rabbit's mistress has almost the last word, and she berates him. In a key symbolic scene, Rabbit is taking leave of an old widow who has employed him to care for the rhododendrons her husband loved. In her house are two paintings. One is a portrait of the woman when young, of which she observes: "Why did he have to make me look so irritable? I didn't like him a whit and he knew it. A slick little Italian. Thought he knew about women." (p 191) The other is a painting of Leda and the swan, a reference to Zeus, king of the Olympian gods and a serial rapist, who disguised himself as a swan and forced himself on Leda. I think Updike is saying that male mistreatment and subjugation of women is timeless. He might have a male protagonist but Rabbit is by no means a hero.

The story is told in the present tense, which was very unusual at the time (the author says he only encountered it in Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson), mostly, but not entirely, from Rabbit's perspective. There are passages of internal monologue bordering on stream of consciousness:

"Brown legs probably, bitty birdy breasts. Beside a swimming pool in France. Something like money in a naked woman, deep, millions. You think of millions as being white. Sink all the way in softly still lots left. Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all, descended from some old Indian-cheater luckier than the rest, inherit the same stuff if they lived in a slum. Glow all the whiter there, on drab mattresses." 

There are also lists. American novelists seem to love lists. For example, when Rabbit is driving through the night, there is a long paragraph listing what he hears on the radio: titles of song after song, commercials for plastic seat covers, and TVs, and cream rinse, and clothes, and table napkins, and wax ... news about Eisenhower and Macmillan and the Dalai Lama ... I suppose the purpose is to anchor the story in a specific time and culture. Since it doesn't record Rabbit's reaction to these stimuli, it doesn't tell us anything about his character, but it offers a context for his life, so that we might more clearly understand what is driving him.

These things, and the frank discussion of sex, made it disruptive and avant garde in its time, launching the career of the author as a novelist, although the prose style and narrative would nowadays be regarded as very conventional. Today we are more shocked by the use of the c-word and the n-word and Rabbit's fundamental misogyny. And, of course, today's society offers many more opportunities to both men and women than were available then. So it can seem dated. Nevertheless, the fundamental issue of how you cope when youthful dreams are wrecked against the rocks of reality, remains the same.

And one thing you can't take away from the book is how well it is written. It is full of incident, from the inciting moment when Rabbit starts his quest to the final scene and those last words: "he runs. Ah: runs. Runs." (p 264) And there are moments of glorious description:

• "In the top of the windshield the telephone wires continually whip the stars." (p 30)
• "Eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl." (p 30)
• "A slash in a window blind throws a long knife of sun on a side wall." (p 40)
• "An airplane goes over, rapidly rattling the air." (p 97) They used propellers in those days.
• "His eyebrows jiggle as if on fishhooks." (p 203)
• "In the street under glaring hardtops drivers bake in stalled traffic." (p 231)

Other selected quotes:

• "You become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town" (p 7)
• "Naturals know. It's all in how it feels." (p 7)
• "If you have the guts to be yourself ... other people'll pay your price." (p 129)
• "His sins a conglomerate of flight, cruelty, obscenity, and conceit; a black clot embodied in the entrails of his birth." (p 169)
• "He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox." (p 203)
• "The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them." (p 250)

Page numbers refer to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition

October 2023; 264 pages

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923)

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

Other books by John Updike reviewed in this blog include:

• Brazil
• Terrorist

"The Golden Droplet" by Michel Tournier

 Idris is a goatherd living in a remote oasis village in the Sahara. One day a blonde woman leaps from a Land Rover and takes his photograph, promising to send him a copy when it is printed in Paris. It's non-appearance awakens a wanderlust in Idris and he travels to the coast and thence to Marseilles and finally Paris. 

The narrative is punctuated by folk stories, from the tale of Khair-ed-Din, known as Barbarossa, to the legend of the portrait of the Blonde Queen, and the story of a folk singer,

Photos and photography are a running theme, usually presaging disaster. Immediately after Idris has had his photo taken, his best friend is killed in an accident. The only photo in the oasis is that of his Uncle and two friends from the army ... taken the night before they were killed. Old Lala wants to adopt Idris because he resembles a photograph of her son, who died. Idris has a photo taken for his passport ... but it is of another man, with a beard. In Paris he goes to what he thinks is a bookshop and sees lots of porno magazines with images of naked men and women. When he finds the woman who took his photo there is a scene in a bar and he is arrested ... having his mugshot taken. A collector of (male child) shop mannequins takes photographs of the parties he holds with them. Even when he earns money as an extra in a film and forms a friendship with the director, going to his flat to look through an album of photographs, Idris is subsequently mugged by the pimp of the boys who normally go with the director. 

If it isn't photos, it is the making of images: 

• Khair-ed-Din's portrait painter says "I am a painter of the depths, and the depths of a human being are transparent on his face once the agitation of day-to-day life ceases." (p 36).
• Idris sees his first TV on the ferry to Marseilles: it shows adverts and the news of a riot in Paris.
• Another job he gets is to have a plaster cast made of his body to be turned into display mannequins.
• Idris learns calligraphy

And there is the theme of the golden droplet, a jewel found by Idris before he leaves the oasis and lost by him when he loses his virginity to a whore in Marseilles at the midpoint of the book. 

Selected quotes:

Page numbers are from the Barbara Wright translation published by Methuen in paperback form in 1988

• "These men had become impalpable, colourless, odourless and insipid, because they had been reduced to figures, to signs, to abstract shapes." (p 71)
• "A defence against the maleficent power of the image, which seduces the eye, might be found in the acoustic sign, which alerts the ear." (p 171)
• "And there, poor among the poor, he did what the poor have an inexhaustible vocation for, he waited, motionless and patient." (p 79)
• "If what you have to say is not more beautiful than silence, Then keep quiet!" (p 177)
• "There is more truth in the ink of scholars than in the blood of martyrs." (p 177)
• "The faculty given to the calligrapher to lengthen certain letters horizontally introduces silence into the line, zones of calm and repose, which are the desert itself." (p 178)
• "The hand must be a ballerina and dance lightly over the parchment, not weigh down on it like a farm labourer with his plough." (p 179)
• "The sculptor's chisel; liberates the girl, the athlete or the horse from the block of marble. In the same way, signs are all prisoners of the ink and the inkwell. The reed pen liberates them, and releases them on the page. Calligraphy is liberation." (p 179)
• "The image is always retrospective. It is a mirror turned towards the past." (p 178)
• "The image is endowed with the power to paralyse, as for instance the head of Medusa, which turned to stone all those who came within its gaze." (p 185)

A short little book, delightfully written and full of incident. Idris ia a great Everyman. There are some very strange and very funny moments. Above all, it is thoughtful and challenges the reader to think. I'm not sure I understand it fully; I will probably need three or four more reads to get much from it. But it is beautifully constructed and works even if only on the level of a good story, well told.

'Moni Boni', another reviewer on goodreads, points out that the Idris finds only "visual fictions of himself" and that the book critiques the "Western world's cultural obsession with images."

September 2023; 198 pages

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

"The Beekeeper of Aleppo" by Christy Lefteri

Nuri , the eponymous protagonist, and his blind wife Afra, are in a bed & breakfast in a seaside town in England, asylum seekers applying for refugee status. Each chapter begins with their life now (told in the first person, present tense) until a single word triggers memories (past tense) of their life in Syria and the journey they have taken. They are traumatised by their experiences and bit by bit through the accounts of their sufferings we come to realise their strengths and weaknesses, and the psychological adaptations they have been forced to adopt in order to endure. 

It starts with a literary paragraph but very quickly it becomes a simply told narrative, with a strong plot. I read it quickly, turning the pages rapidly, because I wanted to know what had happened (there was just the right amount of foreshadowing) and what would happen to them (would they be granted the right to remain?). Nevertheless, even though much of the story was plot-driven, it was fundamentally about these two characters, and it was their psychological development that was at the heart of the book. The deft skill shown by the author in bringing the reader to learn about these two people was tremendous and lifts this book into the five-star category.

The book promoted a lively discussion at my reading-group. There was a (minority) view that the book was ‘propaganda’ since the novel failed to incorporate any discussion of the wider social ramifications of immigration. I disagreed. While an academic social-political study should seek balance, that is not the job of a novelist. The novel as an art form is fundamentally focused on individuals. War and Peace is an acknowledged attempt to understand the processes of history (there is a section of about fifty pages that considers this) but fundamentally it is a story focused around a small (relatively, compared with the length of the book) cast of characters. Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy is also focused on individuals. Moby-Dick is fundamentally about Captain Ahab, despite the chapters on whales. Many novels seek to develop social, political, or moral themes but they do so by telling individual stories . I don't believe the failure to provide 'balance' is a relevant or legitimate criticism of any novel. 

Furthermore, this novel resolutely refuses to provide any form of closure. You don't know whether Nuri and Afra will be granted leave to remain. Not finishing stories was a hallmark of the book (what happened to the twins?). I assume that this was a stylistic choice of the author and I feel that it might be a metaphor for the transience of relationships developed when fleeing conflict and the fact that on such a journey you will never know what happened to most of the people you encounter. But it also meant that the author was asking questions rather than providing answers and that does seem to be a function of a novel.

There was also a comment that the characters weren’t fully developed. This is true. Generally, I like character and dislike plotline and this book has a strong narrative thread and a lot of the characterisation is left to the reader. I think this is a stylistic feature and a strength of the book. This author specialises in hinting rather than expounding. Nevertheless, there is clear psychological character development within the narrative, and I felt this was a strength of the book.

My only point of comparison is with American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins which is a meticulously researched thriller. The BoA is equally well researched but gentler. You know from the start that they will reach the end of their journey, that they will survive physically. This book is more psychological, about understanding the damage caused to them by their experiences. That made it even better.

Selected quotes:

• "I am scared of my wife's eyes. She can’t see out and no one can see in. Look, they are like stones, grey stones, sea stones. Look at her. Look how she is sitting on the edge of the bed, her nightgown on the floor, rolling Mohammed’s marble around in her fingers and waiting for me to dress her. I am taking my time putting on my shirt and trousers, because I am so tired of dressing her. Look at the folds of her stomach, the colour of desert honey, darker in the creases, and the fine, fine silver lines on the skin of her breasts, and the tips of her fingers with the tiny cuts, where the ridges and valley patterns once were stained with blue or yellow or red paint. Her laughter was gold once, you would have seen as well as heard it. Look at her, because I think she is disappearing." (First paragraph)
• "She cried like a child, laughed like bells ringing, and her smile was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen." (Ch 1)
• "But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know." (Ch 1) A foreshadowing of the theme of the book.
• "She won’t live very long like this – she’s been banished from her colony because she has no wings." (Ch 2) The crippled bee symbolises exiles.
• "O Allah keep me alive as long as is good for me, and when death is better for me, take me." (Ch 2)
• "People are not like bees. We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good" (Ch 3)
• "I don’t like their queues, their order, their neat little gardens and neat little porches and their bay windows that glow at night with the flickering of their TVs. It all reminds me that these people have never seen war." (Ch 6)
• "the right side of the picture was left without colour. Strangely this reminded me of the white crumbling streets once the war came. The way the colour was washed out of everything. The way the flowers died." (Ch 8)
• "and I can’t go back. I am a dead. I want to leave from here. I want to find work. But nobody want me." (Ch 9)
• "I thought about Sami. First his smile. Then the moment the light fell from his eyes and they turned to glass." (Ch 9)
• "I look at her eyes, so full of fear and questions and longing, and I had thought it was her who was lost, that Afra was the one stuck in the dark places of her mind." (Ch 12)
• "And there we both stand, battered by life, two men, brothers, finally reunited in a world that is not our home." (Ch 14)
• "Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness." (Ch 14)

A delightful book, full of compassion, yet at the same time with a strong story. September 2023

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

Question I was left to ponder:
Do all novels focus on individuals. Are there examples of those that don't?

"I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith

Lewes Castle really does have a house built into it; you can see the shadow of the main keep.

This novel is coming-of-age story done in the form of an epistolary novel, written in the form of a journal, although a journal irregularly kept and with very long entries. This means that, despite being narrated in the first person by the protagonist and in the past tense, the reader never knows what the outcome might be . It enables the narrator to comment on the action (eg: "Dancing is peculiar when you really think about it. If a man held you hand and put his arm around your waist without its being dancing, it would be most important; in dancing, you don't even notice it - well, only a little bit."; 2.8) and it allows the reader to sometimes feel that they are 'one step ahead' of the narrator, such as when the reader realises that Stephen is (slavishly) in love with Cassandra before she does.

The book starts by describing the cast of eccentrics that make up the Mortmain family:

• Father is the author of a critically successful experimental novel who now suffers from writer's block.
• Step-mother Topaz is an ex-model, devoted to her husband, who loves sunbathing nude. Cassandra pokes fun at her for her art and for her consciously artistic views but Topaz holds the family together: "The real Topaz is the one who cooks and scrubs and sews for us all. How mixed people are - how mixed and nice!" (3.14)
• Elder sister Rose hates being poor and is prepared to do anything for money, even proposing to become a prostitute or at least marry a rich husband.
• Cassandra, the narrator, is a dreamer; she starts as a naive young girl and the book chronicles her passage to maturity.
• Thomas, younger brother, is a schoolboy yet he can be very perceptive when necessary.
• Stephen is the orphaned family retainer who lives with them and goes out to work and gives them all his money; he is desperately in love with Cassandra but he can't tell her because he feels inferior to her.

Minor characters include Miss Blossom, a dressmaker's dummy, who acts both as a source of maternal consolation to the sisters (Topaz, though fulfilling the role of a stepmother in all practical ways, could scarcely be called motherly) and acting as a sort of conscience and advisor to Cassandra.

They all live in a partially ruined castle in the poorest of circumstances. This is genteel poverty as depicted in so many Victorian books; they have zero income and they've sold their jewellery and most of their furniture ("All we really have enough of is floor."; 2.10) but it doesn't seem to occur to any of them (except the family retainer) to go out and work. Escape from their circumstances depends on Father starting work again, or marrying a rich husband, or living off the earnings of the one working-class member of the household. The local villagers also support and tolerate them in a quasi-feudal relationship. Not only is there no trace of feminism, the class complacency in this book, of penniless aristocrats nevertheless lording it over the uncultured but hard-working peasantry is staggering. Though, to be honest, this is another faithful reflection of the Austen oeuvre. 

A fanfiction mashup?
Towards the end of Chapter 2, the narrator, Cassandra, is discussing with her sister Rose, the re-opening of the nearby stately home and Rose’s desire to marry a man with money (almost any man) and they realise that they are in a position similar to the start of Pride and Prejudice. Rose wants to live in a Jane Austen novel and Cassandra would rather be in a Charlotte Bronte novel and they decide that 50% of each would be perfect.

Cassandra was the name of Jane Austen’s sister in real life.

Almost immediately after meeting the two (somewhat estranged) brothers who are the new owners of Scoatney Hall, Cassandra overhears prickly Neil and easy-going Simon discussing her and Rose in very unflattering terms; one warns the other about gold-digging girls. This is almost a copy of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where protagonist Lizzie overhears stand-offish Mr Darcy disparage her and her sisters to more easy-going Mr Bingley.

Cassandra’s father spends most of his time in the Gatehouse, reading, just like Mr Bennett spends most of his time in the library. But both fathers are perceptive and offer words of wisdom.

Stephen is a poor and stunningly handsome boy who is in love with Cassandra (she gets a funny feeling when she thinks of him but doesn’t think it’s love) and who works for the family (he lives with them and they exist on the wages he earns from the nearby farmer). He adores Cassandra but he knows his place. There is a wistful scene in chapter 7 when she tells him that “gentlemen are men who behave like gentlemen” and he replies that “you can only be a gentleman if you’re born one, Miss Cassandra”. Here are the makings of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (admittedly an Emily Bronte novel rather than Charlotte). Stephen is being tempted by a lady photographer to model for him and to act in the movies. Heathcliff, too, had to go away to become rich. Perhaps Stephen/ Heathcliff's return in a vengeful mood might form a sequel to this novel.

There's a hint, too, of Austen's Sense and Sensibility in which one sister thinks you should marry for money, but ends up marrying for love, and the other sister takes the opposite course. 

But if the set-up is a Bronte-Austen mashup, the development of the plot suggests alternative outcomes. Nevertheless, the open ending - which is foreshadowed: in chapter eleven Cassandra says that she doesn't really like "a novel with a brick-wall happy ending - I mean the kind of ending where you never think any more about the characters." - allows one to speculate on what the sequel might have been.

The least Austenish of the characters (except for Stephen, the Bronte intrusion) is Topaz. She's like Mrs Bennett only in the she conspires with Ruth to get her married to a wealthy man and that Cassandra pokes fun at her in the early stages of the novel. But there is a very real side to Topaz. Yes, she used to be a nude model (who still occasionally goes up to London to pose) but her daily life is the usual mother's grind of cooking and cleaning and mending clothes and her relationship with her husband becomes very real when she suspects that he might be committing adultery, if only in his mind. I thought Topaz was a super character who transcended all her stereotypes.

Selected quotes:

• "I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring." (1.1)
• "I told her that she couldn't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk." (1.1)
• "Anyone who could enjoy the winter here would find the North Pole stuffy." (1.3)
• "The last stage of a bath, when the water is cooling and there is nothing to look forward to, can be pretty disillusioning. I expect alcohol works much the same way." (1.4)
• "I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them." (1.4)
• "She was wearing her hand-woven dress which is first cousin to a sack." (2.7)
• "Long prayers are like nagging." (2.8)
• "I love owls, but I wish God had made them vegetarian." (2.8)
• "This desire for solitude often overwhelms her at house-cleaning times." (2.10)
• "How moons do vary! Some are white, some are gold,this was like a dazzling circle of tin." (2.10)
• "As if our moat took any notice of sunshine! It is fed by a stream that apparently comes straight from Greenland." (2.10)
• "Happy ever after ... What I'd really hate would be the settled feeling, with nothing but happiness to look forward to." (3.11)
• "Surely it isn't normal for  anyone so miserably in love to eat and sleep so well? Am I a freak? I only know that I am miserable, I am in love, but I raven food and drink." (3.13)
• "As I never gave the Church a thought when I was happy, I could hardly expect it to do anything for me when I wasn't. You can't get insurance money without paying the premiums." (3.13)
• "I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness." (3.13)
• "The Vicar and Miss Marcy had managed to by-pass the suffering that comes to most people - he by his religion, she by her kindness to others.  And it came to me that if one does that, one is liable to miss too much along with the suffering - perhaps, in a way, life itself. Is that why Miss Marcy seems so young for her age - why the Vicar, in spite of all his cleverness has that look of an elderly baby?" (3.13)
• "I don't like the sound of all those lists he's making - it's like taking too many notes at school, you feel you've achieved something when you haven't." (3.15)
• "No sunrise I ever saw was more beautiful than when the thick grey mist gradually changed to a golden haze." (3.16)
• "Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper." (3.16)

A beautifully written page-turner with an eccentric cast, pervaded with a wry observational humour. Delightful. 

September 2023; 408 pages

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

Other books which have 'castle' in their title include:

• In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner (literary criticism)
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Wold
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro (short stories with a linked, memoir theme)
• The Castle by Franz Kafka (a classic novel)
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick (dystopian future novel; also an Amazon prime series)
• The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton (a children's novel)
• King of the Castle by Susan Hill (a novel)
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (a classic gothic novel)
• Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (a gothic novel from Jane Austen's time)
• Hatter's Castle by A J Cronin: a novel about a megalomanical bullying patriarch set in Scotland

"River Kings" by Cat Jarman

 This is a book explaining how the trade networks of the Vikings enabled a carnelian bead to be found in Repton. It is written by an archaeologist.

Leif Eriksson's statue in Reyjkavik

The Vikings were traders, as well as raiders. In some ways they epitomise free enterprise: they made money by trade, by theft, by looting, by threat and extortion, by kidnap and ransom, by kidnap and slavery. Enterprise when it is truly free, without any bureaucratic red-tape (or even any laws). That's entrepreneurship!

Cat Jarman's book is a well-written and interesting addition to this developing perspective on the Vikings. I was particularly impressed with how clearly she explained:

• How the DNA analysis available from 'ancestry' websites matches you with matching populations in the places where they live now (which doesn't necessarily correspond with where they lived back in the days).
• How Y-chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA can throw light on the different fates of men and women (in Iceland 75% of modern Icelandic men had ancestry compatible with present-day Scandinavian populations but 62% of women had ancestry matching modern populations in the British Isles including Ireland and Scotland which suggests that in the early population of Iceland Scandinavian men interbred with (possibly slave) British women; slave women are more likely to breed than slave men).
• How radio-carbon dating of skeletons may throw up anomalous results for those on a heavy fish diet.
• How bone isotope analysis can suggest where somebody grew up.

The blurb suggested that this book would "transform the way you think about the Vikings." Not for me. I knew they were traders as well as raiders. I knew they had travelled extensively in Russia and that they had reached Constantinople. These things have been known for decades. My only surprise was the extent to which they were slave traders. So I wasn't enthralled (which word, we are told in chapter 2) comes from the Viking word 'trell' or 'thrall' which means a slave). 

But, quite apart from the science of archaeology mentioned above, there were many things that I did learn from this book. For example:

• Monasteries were targets for armies because they stored food which they collected as taxes (‘feorm’ = ‘food rent’) from the local population. Armies need feeding. (Ch 3)
• The first Viking attack recorded in the AS Chronicle was not Lindisfarne but at Portland on the south coast, not far from the 'emporia' (trading station) of Hamwic, now Southampton. (Ch 4)
• For fallen warriors who didn’t make it to Valkyrie, they might be picked by Freya (actually she got first pick) to go to Sessrumnir, her hall in Folkvang (= Field of Folk). (Ch 4) I wondered whether Freya’s Field of Folk made its way into Piers Plowman to become the fair field of folk that Langland spied at the beginning of his poem.
• “The only accounts we have of Asgard, the world of the Norse gods, come from sources written down from the eleventh century onwards, many of them even later.” Some of the buildings may have been influenced by what the Vikings saw in Byzantium etc. (Ch 9)
• ‘Alexander’s wall’ was the Great Wall of China (Ch 9)
• Analysis of DNA from ancient specimens suggest that smallpox originated in about 600.  It may have been spread through north-western Europe as a result of the widespread travelling of Vikings. (Ch 8)
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions in the entry for 883 CE "an embassy sent to the shrine of St Thomas in ‘India/Indea’ by none other than Alfred the Great ... both St Thomas and St Bartholomew, who is also mentioned in the entry, appear to have been martyred in India ... There are documented Christian communities in India from the fifth century.” (Ch9)

So, despite not being astonished and amazed, this book was an enjoyable read, with plenty of interesting facts.

Selected quotes:

“Tracing the objects and materials that went back and forth, the routes they travelled on, and the people who took part in the transactions, is a bit like watching a drop of water running down an uneven windowpane: flowing downwards with gravity, changing path and direction if it uncovers a flaw in the glass, stopping when it reaches an insurmountable obstacle until its path is taken up again when joined by further drops that add the necessary momentum.” (Ch 9)

September 2023; 300 pages

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