"Milton in America" by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a prolific author of many, many books. Those I have read (links are to reviews in this blog) are:

Fiction:

• Hawksmoor: stunningly brilliant; spooky; dark
• The Last testament of Oscar Wilde
• Chatterton: flitting in between London 1770 and London 1856 this is a thoroughly enjoyable read about reality and forgery, plagiarism and originality, truth and lies
• The House of Doctor Dee: a timeshifting novel that didn't quite work for me
• Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
• The Lambs of London: vary enjoyable with some beautifully subtle dialogue
• The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein: an interesting conceit but rather heavy going though with a nice twist at the end.

Non fiction:

• Thames: an immense tome: great as reference but not to read (there are several pages just listing all the St Mary's churches on the banks of the Thames!)
• Dickens: a superb biography
• Blake: an immensely thorough yet at the same time readable and indeed enjoyable biography
• Chaucer
• Wilkie Collins: a brilliant bijou biography
• Newton

This is a strange book. The first half ('Eden') is narrated in part by Goosequill, a poor London boy whom Milton hires as secretary and guide (Milton being blind) and in part by letters from Milton to an English acquaintance: there is a certain amount of comic potential derived from the fact that Milton regards Goosequill as a clown and a fool whereas the reader sees Goosequill save Milton's life in a shipwreck and tenderly care for him and put up with his tantrums . M & G go to America and find a puritan village which elects to be lead by the famous John Milton and to call itself New Milton

Halfway through the book, in the 'Fall', Milton wanders off and, in mystical scenes, appears to break his leg, be cared for by the Indian heathen savages he so detests and regain his sight. On his retirn his puritan zeal is intensified. Where he had been intolerant not he is bigoted. The target for his wrath is a bearby village of Papists who get on with the local Indians and preach tolerance, as opposed to the narrow-minded puritans of New Milton. Goosequill does his best to mediate but Milton's fierce hatred of anything that is not his version of the truth whips up the flames of war. This second section of the book is mostly narrated in the third person omniscient point of view.

Peter Ackroyd's prose is brilliant but difficult to capture in quotes. His true genius is in the way his characters interact. The way in which Goosequill tells his story to his new wife, with various asides about babies and making love, and her 'get along with you' rebuttals, is a masterclass.

• "He was all toughened and weathered, and I suspected that there was a great deal of ale within him somewhere." (p 35)
• "I tremble to think of the sordid sperm engendered by their lustiness". (p 95)
• "If he had worked me harder, there could have been a burial service." (p 119)
• "They do not worship their god because they say that, being god, he will do them no harm." (p 134)
• "Where there is glory, there must also be terror, where there is reverence, there must be fear." (p 145)
• "Even Gods have lived in the woods ... does not Dante write that the trees contain the souls of suicides? ... In the dark wood of this world I lost my way." (p 198)
• "The blind man wandered ahead and, weeping, through the dark wood took his solitary way" (last line; echoes of Dante; and, of course, Paradise being truly lost).

A fascinating story about how intolerance breeds tragedy. I suspect that the way Milton muddles up racism with religious intolerance and the way he confuses heretical religious practices with sodomy is intended to resonate with us today; Ackroyd is using the religious battles of yesteryear as an allegory of our own intolerances and bigotries today.

July 2017;

Books by Peter Ackroyd reviewed in this blog:
Historical fiction

• The Clerkenwell Tales
• Chatterton
• The House of Doctor Dee
• The Lambs of London
• Milton in America
• The Fall of Troy

Biography

• Wilkie Collins
• Blake

"Out of this world" by Graham Swift

Graham Swift won the Booker Prize for Last Orders and was shortlisted for Waterland, both amazing books.

Harry, son of a first world war VC turned arms manufacturer, is a photographer who specialises in recording the horror of war. He is estranged from his daughter Sophie who lives in New York with her travel agent husband and their two twins. The story is almost entirely narrated alternately by Harry and by Sophie, whose narrations are mostly talking to her therapist.

As the novel progresses we learn about the traumas of their lives, the wife lost in childbirth, the wife lost in a plane crash, the father blown up by a car bomb. Theirs is a slow journey towards reconciliation.

"Everything in the garden was lovely. Hasn't it got to be that way? So we can believe we came from Paradise? Then it gets fucked later." (p 51)
"You belong nowhere. Or rather: This is the only place you belong - this transit region, this in-between space." (p 121)

Beautifully written. June 2017; 208 pages

"Shylock is my name" by Howard Jacobson

The book starts with the sentence: "It is one of those better-to-be-dead-than-alive days you get in the north of England in February, the space between the land and sky a mere letter box of squeezed light, the sky itself unfashionably banal." (p 1) This seems to summarise the rather depressing, not to mention convoluted, story to come. A rich philanthropist, Simon Strulovich, whose second wife is an invalid following a stroke, whose daughter has been trying to run off with men since the age of thirteen, meets Shylock, whose wife Leah is dead, whose daughter Jessica has run off with a man. Yers, the real Shylock, at least the real character in the play, who seems to have acquired flesh (and more than a pound). Tangential to all this is Plurabelle, daughter of another very rich man, who repeatedly requires her suitors to guess which of several choices her whim has alighted on this time.

One of the problems I found was that I just didn't really care about the problems of these rich men worried about their spoilt daughters. And much of the humour seemed heavy handed. And there was a lot of theology.

The half way turning point occurs when Strulovich asks that his sixteen-year-old daughter's much older footballer husband undergoes circumcision as the price of his daughter's hand. A two page dissertation follows on the theology of circumcision: is it a mutilation or not? And circumcision becomes the proxy for the pound of flesh.

Possibly for good reasons, Shylock really doesn't like Christians. He is very apt to talk about 'Christians' in generalities. For example, Shylock claims that "they can't see a Jew without thinking they have to tell him a joke" (p 63), "they feel no embarrassment in proclaiming that the proper Jew is a wandering Jew" (p 64), that gentiles "haven't been able to draw their imaginations from us sexually for centuries" (p 69). Shylock also points out that Jesus was Jewish and claims: "Charity is a Jewish concept. So is mercy." And it is not just Shylock. Strulovich explains to his daughter why a gentile husband cannot be good enough for her: "your intelligence is five thousand years old, they were born yesterday. They can only think one thing at a time; you can think a dozen." (p 206) I found this repeated drawing of battle lines between Jews and Christians exhausting; no character seemed able to see beyond their tribe.

A difficult book. Perhaps I needed to know the play more intimately to appreciate the finer points. But in the end the characters seemed stereotypical and the endless philosophising just seemed endless.

March 2017; 277 pages

Some nice lines:

• "With water you did wash away the foul impurities of death." (p 54) has a slightly archaic sentence construction (the insertion of 'did') which makes you pay greater attention to the sentence and thus imparts a little extra emphasis.
• "On occasions she even cried over their incompatibility of whim." (p 73)
• "his friend, still bedwarmed, so to speak, with the perfumes of Plurabelle still on him" (p 73)

Other novels which adapt a Shakespeare play and are reviewed in this blog include:

Vinegar Girl by Ann eTyler which rewrites The Taming of the Shrew: very funny
Nutshell by Ian McEwan rewrites Hamlet and is told from the perspective of a not quite yet born baby
The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson rewrites A Winter's Tale and is mostly brilliant
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood is set in a prison and rewrites The Tempest: fabulous

"Hag-Seed" by Margaret Atwood

Felix Phillips is ousted as Artistic director of a Theatre festival by his right-hand man and swears revenge. Driven into theatrical exile he gets a job as teacher on a drama course at a prison. Then, as he and his prisoners prepare a production of The Tempest, the Minister for Justice and others in his retinue pay a visit to the prison. And real life events seem to match the events on stage step by step.

This is an ingenious and beautifully written update version of Shakespeare's classic. It also manages to be a brilliant critique of the play:

• "Everyone loved the fight scenes: that's why Shakespeare put them in." (p 58)
• "The optimistic characters are stakeholders in the more positive side of human nature, the pessimistic characters in the more negative side." (p 259)

I love Atwood's work. Here we have genius:

• Her description of the smell of the prison: "Unfresh paint, faint mildew, unloved food eaten in boredom, and the smell of dejection, the shoulders slumping down, the head bowed, the body caving in upon itself. A meagre smell. Onion farts. Cold naked feet, damp towels, motherless years." (pp 74 - 75) Motherless years makes me want to weep.
• Her understanding of the fundamentals of humanity: "You know teenage girls, they desert their adored daddies the minute some young ripped stud heaves into view" (p 141)
• The joy of being alive: "Real life is brilliantly coloured ... It's made up of every possible hue, including those we can't see. All nature is a fire: everything forms, everything blossoms, everything fades. We are slow clouds ..." (p 178) Colourful philosophy.
• Appreciation of feminine beauty: "If he were their age he'd be leaning forward too. Actually, he is leaning forward." (p 256) Truth and humour entangled.

Books by Margaret Atwood reviewed in this blog:

• The Heart Goes Last: a homeless couple enter a utopian community
• Bodily Harm: A wonderful Graham Greenesque excursion to a Caribbean island where no one is who they seem to be
• Oryx and Crake: adventures in a world post climate change
• Hag-Seed: a brilliant retelling of the Tempest, re enacted in a prison
• The Handmaid's Tale: the one that everyone raves about ... but not her best.
• The Blind Assassin: an elderly lady remembers the tragedy of her sister

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

"How To Be Both" by Ali Smith

In 2014 this was the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize (awarded to "fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form") and the Costa Prize  and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It also won the Women's Prize for fiction in 2015.

It is written in two halves which can be read in either order; indeed, two versions of the book were printed. 

The first half of this beautifully written book concerns George (Georgia), a teenager mourning her recently deceased mum. She is remembering her mum. One of the things she remembers is about going to Italy on a whim of her mum's to see a painting that her mum liked by an artist who was almost totally unknown except by a letter and a few wonderful paintings. George feels guilty about when she read text messages on her mum's phone: they seem to concern another woman having an affair with mum. George herself is helped through the grieving process by Helena who wants to be a little more than just friends.

In George's memory her mother is always posing conundrums: "Which comes first ... What we see or how we see? ... Do things just go away? ... Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can't see them happening in front of us?"

Things George's mother says:

• "This place is shaking loose everything I thought I knew" 
• "You always know where you are after a kiss." 

The second half of the book is narrated by the ghost of the Italian artist who is dragged back into the world by the obsessive interest George takes in their paintings. I really loved this section;  the artist is so visual and says things like: 

• "thin for a scholar who're usually heavy and inadequate from all the nothing but books" (p 198)
• "I'm good at the real and the true and the beautiful and can do with some skill and with or without flattery the place where all 3 meet" (p 199)
• "there's a very pure pleasure in a curve like the curve of a buttock." (p 201)
• "a curved line is a warm thing, good-natured, will serve you well if not mistreated." (p 201)
• "Art and love are a matter of ... understanding the colours that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other: the least that the practice will make you is skillful: beyond which there's originality itself, which is what practice is really about in the end." (p 273)
• "Love and painting both are works of skill and aim: the arrow meets the circle of its target, the straight line meets the curve or circle" (p 273)
• "eyes that can follow you round the room, cause those are God eyes." (p 305)
• "A picture is most times just picture: but sometimes a picture is more" (p 307)
• "when we paint the alive the alive must be alive to the very smallest part, each hair on the head or the arm of an alive person being itself alive" (p 343)
• "Saints are all about death. It's prerequisite, for saints" (p 347)

On page 220ish we learn something about the artist that has been well bread-crumbed, especially in the George mourning her mother section, but which I never spotted. This was so well done!

There is a wonderful set piece which had me laughing aloud; a ceremony in which Justice is played by a boy balancing, teetering, on a float with a too-heavy sword in his hand. And when the crowd cheered "the dressed-up boys on the cart looked soaked through by the noise of the crowd like they'd just been driven through a waterfall." (p 261)

I think this book is about everything being connected. In Italy George's mother talks about where they were was ruled by a family who influences the art and music of its time which influenced Ariosto which influenced Shakespeare which influenced her and G: "nothing's not connected". After G's mum's death, G makes toast for little brother Henry and muses that "she can leave dregs of butter in whatever jam she likes for the rest of her life now". The dead Italian artist cried as a child seeing ripples disappear but was told: "The ring you saw in the water'll never stop travelling till the edge of the world."

Another theme is the inevitability of love. George understands true helplessness when Helena pushes her around a multi-storey car park in a shopping trolley. And after she flicks an insect of her hand she thinks: 

• "It must have felt like being punched by a god.
  That's when she sensed, like something blurred and moving glimpsed through a partition whose glass is clouded, both that love was coming for her and the nothing she could do about it."

A wonderful book. November 2016; 372 pages

Ali Smith also wrote The Accidental which I didn't like so much at the time but I am going to reread because this book was so good I must have missed the other. She has also written There but for the: a set of stories linked by a man who, at a dinner party, locks himself into one of the upstairs rooms of his host and refuses to come out. Try also the fascinating Artful, a fusion of literary lectures notes with a story about the narrator imagining that their dead partner is haunting the house.

Other brilliant books by the most original of modern English writers include:

• Autumn: a collage type work
• Winter, another collage type work which weaves the story of a Christmas Carol with Cymbeline and the Nativity and reflects on Britain following the Brexit referendum.

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

"Les Enfants terribles" by Jean Cocteau

Paul, a schoolboy, hero worships Dargelos the school bad boy who throws a stone-filled snowball at him and makes him ill. Gerard, who hero worships Paul, takes him home to the flat where Paul's sister Elisabeth tends their dying mother.

And in this world of orphans and illness, maintained by servants paid for by benefactors (initially the doctor and Gerard's Uncle) Paul and Elisabeth play The Game, a game of sibling rivalry mingled with unconsummated incestuous desires, a game into which they draw Gerard and later Angela, an orphan who is the spitting image of Dargelos. They mature physically and adult sexuality begin to distort the rules of the Game, but they never grow up mentally and the Play still explodes with childish tantrums.

Inevitably this must lead to tragedy.

This is a book about power and the way in which it warps human behaviour. The enclosed world in which the Game operates reminded me of the arcane world of Ritual in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. It was interesting, too, how Cocteau explored child sexuality from schoolboy crush to adolescent passion.

The prose reminds me a little of William Burroughs (although Cocteau's narrative is far more linear than those in, eg The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine or The Wild Boys.  Cocteau is not afraid to write poetic images into prose and there are moments of lyrical beauty although these moments always threaten to purple and overblow. Judge for yourself:

• "Lord of space and time, dweller in the twilit fringes between light and darkness, fisher in the confluent pools of truth and fantasy," (p 15)
• "the atmosphere of perpetually impending storm which was the breath of life to both of them." (p 35)
• "this puppet in the place of a live person." (p 38)
• "Beyond the boundaries of the ordinary world of lives and houses, unguessed, undreamed of in their common-sense philosophy, lies the vast realm of the improbably: a world too disordered, so it would seem, to hold together for a fortnight, let alone for several years. And yet these lives, these houses continue to maintain a precarious equilibrium in defiance of all laws of man and nature. All the same, persons who base their calculations on the inexorable pressure of the force of circumstance assume, correctly, that such lives are doomed. The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition. And yet, all started harmlessly, in childish games and laughter ..." (p 61)

An very short but extraordinarily complex and surrealist novel. I need to think about it hard! October 2016; 135 pages

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood

The Snowman is, so far as he is aware, the last homo sapiens sapiens left in a world where the sun fries his skin, there is a daily thunderstorm, and the environment is populated by genetic mutations like vicious woolvogs, cute rakunks, sinister pigoons and snats (half snake, half rat). He lives in a tree by the sea shore near the Children of Crake, a new (genetically modified) human. The Snowman is their prophet, telling them all about Crake, their creator (literally in this case, Crake being the scientist who designed their genetic blueprint) and Oryx their teacher. Having run out of ammunition for his spray gun, he has to travel back to the research compound where he used to work, and live, to find supplies.

On the journey he travels back in his memory to his childhood, when he was Jimmy, his schooldays when he first met Crake and they both first saw Oryx, a child actor on an internet porn site, and his days when he worked as an advertiser for the research company for which Crake also worked. Commercial interests forced the world down the slippery slope of genetic modification and the law of unintended consequences was, as it always is, supreme.

And the ending is cliff-hanger perfect. What happens next?

It is, of course, the wonderful prose and the superb images it conjures, which put Margaret Atwood's science fiction megaparsecs ahead of the competition. This is literary fiction, justly shortlisted for the Booker in 2003 (it was quite a year, Vernon God Little won, Brick Lane and Notes on a Scandal were both on the shortlist). It was also shortlisted for the Women's Prize in Fiction. 

Right from page one, Atwood's descriptions are precise and perfect:

• "The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette ... rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon" (p 1)
• "the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks" (p 1)
• "the sky a bleached blue, except for the hole burnt in it by the sun" (p 13) 
• "a picture of a pretty girl ... glaring out through smudgy charcoal eyes with a mean stare and her hair standing up stiff like quills" (p 19)
• "She took very small bites, and managed to chew up the lettuce without crunching." (p 28)
• "She talked like a shower-gel babe in an ad" (p 28)
• "it began to mildew, and to smell tantalizingly of tomato soup" (p 43)
• "This hearty way of talking was getting worse, as if his father was auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope." (p 58)
• "Their singing is ... like ferns unscrolling - something old, carboniferous, nut at the same time newborn, fragrant, verdant. It reduces him." (p 122)
• "She had a triangular face - big eyes, a small jaw - a Hymenoptera face, a mantid face, the face of a Siamese cat." (p 133)
• "contemplating the pizza as if it were a jigsaw puzzle." (p 136)
• "he'd roll around in their sympathy, soak in it, massage himself with it. It was a whole spa experience in itself." (p 224)
• "Thumbsucking posterboy." (p 293)
• "The virus ... looked like the usual melting gumdrop with spines." (pp 397 - 398)

Then there are her one-liners and thought-provoking ideas:

• "Nobody nowhere knows what time it is" (p 1); I loved the assonance of no, no, no, like a diminuendo into misery
• "'Two can play at that game,' said the man. 'Any number can play,' said Jimmy's father." (p 21)
• "Old enough ... Such a dumb concept. Old enough for what? To drink, to fuck, to know better? What fathead was in charge of making those decisions?" (p 26)
• "she just didn't want to put her neuron power into long sentences" (p 28)
• "His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it" (p 44)
• "If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice." (p 83)
• "The body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance." (p 98)
• "But if tomorrow is another day, what's today? The same day as it always is." (p 175)
• She "pushed herself over the edge - actually, over the windowsill of her ten-storey-up apartment." (p 290)
• He was "the joker among the twos and threes they'd been dealt in their real lives." (p 294)
• "So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he's been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him." (p 296)
• "He liked to have a hand on Oryx: on her shoulder, her arm, her small waist, her perfect butt. Mine, mine, that hand was saying." (p 368)
• "Good thing about sticks, they grow on trees." (p 390)
• "Simon, you said a mouthful." (p 397)
• "When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing." (p 398)

There are moments when the dialogue is a master class in, err, dialogue. In this extract, Jimmy shows Oryx a picture of her in a porn movie when she was a little girl. (p 105)
"I don't think this is me," was what she'd said at first.
"It has to be!" said Jimmy. "Look! It's your eyes."
"A lot of girls have eyes," she said. "A lot of girls did these things. Very many." Then, seeing his disappointment, she said, "It might be me. Maybe it is. Would that make you happy, Jimmy?"
"No," said Jimmy. Was that a lie?
"Why did you keep it?"
"What were you thinking?" ...
"You think I was thinking?" she said. "Oh Jimmy! You always think everyone is thinking. Maybe I wasn't thinking anything."
This perfectly captures the sweet wistful voice of Oryx as well as the complexity of their sexual relationship; Jimmy's obsession with her past and her determination to live in the present.

Wonderful writing providing quality to a first class yarn: August 2016, 433 pages

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

Books by Margaret Atwood reviewed in this blog:

• The Heart Goes Last: a homeless couple enter a utopian community
• Bodily Harm: A wonderful Graham Greenesque excursion to a Caribbean island where no one is who they seem to be
• Oryx and Crake: adventures in a world post climate change
• Hag-Seed: a brilliant retelling of the Tempest, re enacted in a prison
• The Handmaid's Tale: the one that everyone raves about ... but not her best.
• The Blind Assassin: an elderly lady remembers the tragedy of her sister

"Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs

Naked lunch? William Burroughs remembers Jack Kerouac as coming up with the title and he himself didn't understand it at first but now he says that it is "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Jack Kerouac remembers it as being entitled when Allen Ginsberg was reading it aloud and misread 'naked lust' (which never made the final text).

This book starts well, with an account of a junkie evading capture by the Narcotics police by jumping on a subway train. But the text at the start is pocked with explanatory notes woven into the text. Nevertheless, some of Burroughs razor sharp images come through.

But then the book degenerates. It becomes a procession of rude remarks about women, black people, Arabs, religions: Burroughs seems to be trying his hardest to offend everyone he can. He is obsessed with shit, there is the usual smattering of gay sex (reprising the idea in the Soft Machine that men ejaculate when they are hanged), and as with the soft machine he has a morbid fascination with insects and crustacea. And after the first few pages, the crystal observations seem to have deserted him, although there is a late stand. "It's a wildly unpretty spectacle" (p 177)

This is the book in which Steely Dan makes an appearance (there are three of them, they refer to robust metal dildoes). In this part, Burroughs becomes interested in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and I wondered with John Livingstone Lowes would have made of Burroughs had he analysed his work rather than that of Coleridge in his study of the imagination, The Road to Xanadu.

Although Naked Lunch is hailed as a prime example of the Burroughs 'cut-up' technique, where he supposedly wrote narratives and then chopped them up so that scenes and characters recur, this book has this technique less obviously than The Wild Boys, my favourite Burroughs so far, and The Soft Machine though it is done with rather more effect than in The Ticket that Exploded. Rather, it is assembled into vignettes in which one character or one theme is briefly explored. In the book, Burroughs claims that "You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point" (p 187)(although the book is structured in that the cop chase at the beginning is mirrored by a similar scene very near the end) and "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing ... I am a recording instrument ... I don not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity'" (p 184). I thought the book was summed up in another quote: "Vast adolescent muttering." (p 98)

Nevertheless, the book does have some fascinating moments. Burroughs had a vivid if diseased imagination and there are some ideas that make me want to write a story about them. Here are some other moments where the observation was acute, or the concepts original, or he was just funny:

• "Fingers of rotten ectoplasm" (p 5)
• "You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them?" (p 6)
• "I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants - a body" (p 8)
• "mosaic of sleepless nights" (p 9)
• "Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat. The Mark Inside ..." (p 11) 
• "the threat of torture is used to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved." (p 21)
• "Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand ..." (p 56)
• "Guess he can make his own penicillin" (p 60)
• "ribs you could wash your filthy overalls on" (p 85)
• "Sucking terror from needle scars" (p 194)

But when all is said and done, it wasn't his best. July 2016; 196 pages

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

Page references refer to the paperback of the restored text edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles and published by Fourth Estate in 2010

Books by Burroughs which are reviewed in this blog include:

• The Soft Machine which shares some of the same characters and themes as The Wild Boys 
• The Wild Boys
• Naked Lunch.
• The Place of Dead Roads
• The Ticket that Exploded

The Waves" by Virginia Woolf

This book was rated by the BBC as 16th in their list of best novels of all time. 

"The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it." But the waves is the whole damn point.

Six characters, three boys and girls, are revealed to us using the formula of a direct quotation and then 'said Bernard' or 'said Susan'. Always 'said' although these are their thoughts. Their very first statements are descriptions of what they see and hear: rings, slabs of yellow; these are soon turned into objects perceived. Shortly Louis hides from his friends and Jinny finds him and kisses him and Susan sees and is angry. Bernard begins to tell stories; Rhoda wants to be Jinny or Susan; Neville (I wonder whether Mr Neville in Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac is named after him?) becomes religious, Bernard develops a crush on another boy; Susan hates boarding school and counts the days until she is allowed home.

This is poetry dressed up as prose. It is very hard to read. I need to spend many more days reading it very slowly: there are some books which are meant to be read fast and loose and dome which you are meant to study line by line. But I read this book fast and loose for a first impression and, despite the density of the imagery and the difficulty I found on getting a good grip on the individual life stories, I gained a surprising amount. This is like glancing at an impressionist painting: you see the sea and the sky and the trees, you feel the moving of the wind, yet you know that a careful scrutiny will yield dividends. But on a first, furious reading I got an impression of every character and how they developed differently from the others. I understood some (I doubt all) of the things they did and the things that happened to them: who got married, what their jobs were (still no idea about Neville), who had children. Almost the best bit of the book was Perceval. They (at least some of them) had been at school with Perceval. He is the sort that everyone admires. As they approach 25 they hold a dinner to which he comes (late) to celebrate his departure for India. Shortly after, they hear the shocking news of his death. This affects each one of them in different ways; they remember him for the rest of their lives; it is a bit like remembering the day when Kennedy/ Elvis/ John Lennon/ David Bowie (choose your generation) died. In many ways the book is about Perceval and yet he is the one who doesn't appear on stage.

Some moments of liminality: "we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures."

Some moments of unintended self-parody: "The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying."

I was overwhelmed by the brilliance of Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The Waves is a stunningly good book but, being so much more difficult to read, cannot have had as much impact. But I must read it again.

July 2016; 256 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Hotel du Lac" by Anita Brookner

The book starts with the protagonist, a romantic novelist called Edith Hope, staring out of the window of her room in the eponymous Swiss hotel on a world of greyness, shrouded in mist. She has been 'sent' to the end-of-season hotel as some sort of penance for the exposure of her long adulterous relationship with a married man called David.

In its early stages the book is full of beautiful observations about the predominantly female guests: the woman  who feeds her meal to her badly behaved dog, the greedy woman and daughter combination who love spending their money and who take Edith under their wing (ostensibly because she is alone but actually so they can talk at her and patronise her), the Comtesse who his in the hotel as a sort of retirement home having been put their by her son acting under the orders of his wife.

Into this grey world comes Mr Neville, a man dressed in grey. Disconcertingly, he knows Edith as her nom de plume. Later he seems to be able to read her mind and to know her better than she knows herself. Already slightly sinister, at the half way point of the story he reveals his moral code: "You cannot live someone else's life. You can only live your own. And remember, there are no punishments. Whatever they told you about unselfishness being good and wickedness being bad was entirely inaccurate. It is a lesson for serfs and it leads to resignation. And my policy, you may be surprised to hear, will ensure you any number of friends. People feel at home with low moral standards. It is scruples that put them off." (p 96) This is a man who lives up to the evil in the middle of his name (which makes me wonder about Miss HOPE and the very HotELduLac).

Following this very frank courtship, Edith goes on the last silent boat across the grey lake. This is a chapter reeking in mythic metaphor, to the extent of describing Mr Neville as a "curiously mythological personage". When Edith regrets joining Neville on the boat ("Ships, she knew, were often used by painters as symbols of the soul, sometimes of the soul departing for unknown shores. Of death, in fact. Or, if not of death, not of anything very hopeful.") she reflects on the inappropriateness of the adage that the devil finds work for idle hands: "One cannot even rely on Satan to fulfil his obligations." Mr Neville tells her that "as to vice, there is plenty to be found if you know where to look" and when she replies that she never seems to find it he suggests "that is because you do not give yourself over wholeheartedly to the pursuit. But ... we are going to change all that." And then he proposes. And as they prepare to disembark he says in two beautiful double entendres: "We must get off, Edith. Give me your hand." This, the penultimate chapter, is beautifully written.

The whole book is beautiful. A gentle comedy of manners, well observed, has become a wonderfully Mephistophelean temptation.

Other brilliant lines:

• "everything that Mrs Pusey had said so far was of the utmost triviality. Clearly there were depths here that deserved her prolonged attention." (p 40)
• "The beautiful day had within it the seeds of its own fragility: it was the last day of summer." (p 67)
• "There is something quite heartening about ... simple greed." (p 96)
• "Do me a favour ...I do not have any plans. I never have any plans. I should have thought that was fairly obvious by now. I thought you were supposed to be a writer. Aren't you supposed to be good at observing human nature, or something?  I only ask because you sometimes strike me as being a bit thick." (p 144)

This novel won the Booker Prize in 1984. Other prize winners can be found on this page. 

A fabulous book. July 2016; 184 pages

A detailed review of this book can be found here: https://www.thearticle.com/a-study-of-anita-brookners-hotel-du-lac

Anita Brookner has also written

• Brief Lives, a beautifully written devastatingly sad memoir narrated by a childless widow growing old
• Family and Friends

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

"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

Set in a near future after Christian fundamentalists have taken over a large part of the US and imposed a totalitarian patriarchal hierocracy, Offred (her name means Of Fred) is a 'handmaid', the scarlet and white clothed mistress of one of the powerful commanders. Her job is to provide lustless sex so that the commander can breed children because the birth rate has crashed, many women (never men according to the dogma of the patriarchy) are infertile and many children who are born are deformed and destroyed.

Atwood writes in a simple but lyrical style, delicately dropping breadcrumbs of information, never telling us more than we need for a moment, allowing us slowly to explore the parameters of the strange new world. The back story is always a problem in science fiction; the events that shape the dystopia must (?) be described but this can mean the narrative interrupts; Atwood solves this by doling out the information in tiny nibbles, waiting until over half way through before giving a larger chunk.

Her prose is beautiful, blemished only by those infantile neologisms which American commercial practice imposes on the world, thus there are BirthMobiles and Soul Scrolls and Compubanks and Pornomarts and Feels on Wheels vans and Bun-Dle Buggies.

The Commander's wife, Serena Joy, is an old lady, barren, trapped in a marriage, having achieved what she worked for but possibly not enjoying it now that it has arrived: "her face is sinking in upon itself, and I think of those towns built on underground rivers, where houses and whole streets disappear overnight."

What is beautiful about her writing is the way she can convey peace and despair and hopelessness in sentences of such pure simplicity. It is the way she uses words and very short sentences to comunicate. Simple. Stark. Elegant. Much better than this rubbish that praises her.

Some other gems:

• "A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women"; a point reinforced by mitochondrial DNA.
• "Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
• "at that time men and women tried each other on causally, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit"
• "July, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep"
• "Better never means better for everyone ... It always means worse, for some."
• "I am a blank here, between parentheses."

This book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1986

A joy to read.

June 2016; 324 pages if you include the 'Historical Notes' which add nothing to a gem of a story and which I would recommend you not to read.

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

I am not a usual reader of science fiction but technically this classifies, and as a dystopian vision. Other dystopian books I would recommend in this blog include:

• Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel although the big unanswered question is why the survivors of the plague would be so keen to preserve Beethoven and Shakespeare and so cavalier about preserving engineering and pysics; perhaps the virus attacked scientists preferentially
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: book one is great, book two OK but book three is a real let down; don't bother
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick is said to be great by everyone but I was underwhelmed
• and of course Oryx and Crake, another brilliant novel from Atwood, post-apocalyptic rather than dystopian perhaps.

Books by Margaret Atwood reviewed in this blog:

• The Heart Goes Last: a homeless couple enter a utopian community
• Bodily Harm: A wonderful Graham Greenesque excursion to a Caribbean island where no one is who they seem to be
• Oryx and Crake: adventures in a world post climate change
• Hag-Seed: a brilliant retelling of the Tempest, re enacted in a prison
• The Handmaid's Tale: the one that everyone raves about ... but not her best.
• The Blind Assassin: a regretful memoir from an old lady, recalling her sister

"Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett

I have read Beckett's short novels and they are so similar to this play: brief glimpses, as through a frosted window, of a tramp who wears a hat, falls down; an unsatisfying end. Beautifully written. Enigmatic.

Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) wait by a tree for Godot who, famously, never comes. Pozzo, driving his slave Lucky, comes.

In each Act, Lucky and Pozzo enter and join V and E for a little while. Lucky is Pozzo's slave (although it seems that he obeys Pozzo because he doesn't want Pozzo to get rid of him) and Pozzo drives him with a whip (which Lucky looks after and hands to Pozzo when ordered), kicks and a rope around his neck. In the second act Pozzo is, or pretends to be, blind but his relationship with Lucky hasn't altered.

Lucky has one speech, a nonensical stream of consciousness which lasts over two pages and reminds me of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (Beckett was Joyce's secretary while J was writing FW).

In each Act a boy enters towards the end, after L and E have exited, and tells V and E that Godot isn't coming today but will tomorrow. The boy in  the second act claims not to be the boy in the first act; the boy in the first act mentioned he had a brother who looked after the sheep while he looked after the goats (a Biblical reference?).

Dialogue
Mostly, V and E just talk between themselves. Their dialogue is full of broken thoughts. Beckett was brilliant at writing dialogue that mimics everyday speech and yet hints at enigmas which are never explained.
V: Oh, it's not the worst, I know.
E: What?
V: To have thought.
E: Obviously.
V: But we could have done without it.

Philosophy
The first line is Estragon's as he gives up trying to take his boot off: Nothing to be done
and Vladimir replies: I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.
He turns to Estragon and says: There you are again
E: Am I?

Wow! Two speeches yet and we have two philosophies: carrying on in the face of futility, and the uncertainty of existence.

There are allusions to philosophy throughout. For example, when Estragon does the 'tree' Yoga pose he asks "Do you think God sees me?" as Bishop Berkeley famously wondered about a tree when there was no one around.

Christianity
There are plenty of religious references. On page 3, V says: One of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage. He then goes on to question why this is the story in just one gospel. They are, of course, by a tree (the cross?) without leaves (in the second act, the next day, the tree has a few leaves, resurrection? or just spring?):
E: What is it?
V: I don't know. A willow.
E: Where are the leaves?
V: It must be dead.
E: No more weeping
Funny but essentially profound. Shortly afterwards they contemplate hanging themselves from the tree.

The Boys mind the sheep and the goats.

Symmetry
There is a great deal of symmetry, although it is often broken and lop-sided. One wonders if Beckett was aware of modern Physics in which symmetry appears almost everywhere but is broken on crucial occasions (for example, there is more matter than anti-matter).

The second act more or less repeats the first act. As one critic put it: "nothing happens twice". Both acts end: Well? Shall we go?; Yes, let's go, the first time spoken by E then V, the 2nd by V then E. On neither occasion do they move.

This is one of several moments in the play when the protagonists mirror one another.
V: It hurts?
E: Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
V: No one ever suffers but you. I don't count. I'd like to hear what you'd say if you had what I have.
E: It hurts?
V: Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!
Note the central line of this exchange. Beckett does this regularly, using everyday language to tell us something without being explicit. We know that V has something that hurts. We don't know what. We are teased and tantalised. In this case we assume, from the fact that E immediately points out that V's fly is unbuttoned and the fact that V regularly has to go off to wee that V has a problem with his waterworks. But there are other teases, large and small, where we never find the answer. The largest, of course, being: who is Godot?

On one level, V and E are interchangeable but Vladimir remembers what happened yesterday and Estragon doesn't.

Laughs
There is a lot of humour. A list of words of abuse they shout at each other starts with Moron and Vermin and ends with then together shouting: Critic. In Act Two, V and E pretend to be happy and E asks: What do we do now, now that we are happy? V of course replies: Wait for Godot.

I think V and E might be in Heaven or Hell or Purgatory; it certainly bears all the hallmarks of eternity!

There is a delightful routine where E inspects boots that have been found; they are his but he thinks they are not:
V: It's elementary. Someone came and took yours and left you his.
E: Why?
V: His were too tight for him, so he took yours.
E: But mine were too tight.
V: For you. Not for him.
Of course, when E tries the boots on they are too big for him.

And when E is trying to escape from the stage but finding all the ways blocked, V suggests that he flees into the auditorium where there is Not a soul in sight! but having surveyed it says: You won't? Well, I can understand that.

What does it all mean?
V: In this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come

Evaluation
It is a master-class in writing dialogue. Real people never talk straightforwardly, they rarely answer one another direct, and yet dialogue has to advance the plot. The fractured dialogue with the enigmatic teases keep the reader interested. I would have liked a whole lot more but I can understand why people might start to feel bored.

May 2016; 87 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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