"Hangsaman" by Shirley Jackson

A beautifully written novel about coming of age from a feminist perspective.

In the summer just before she goes to college Natalie Waite has an unpleasant encounter (not clearly specified but presumably sexual) at a Sunday afternoon literary party given by her writer father. At an initiation ceremony in college her refusal to say whether she is a virgin or not leads to her being ostracised by the popular students. Her experiences at college include tea parties with a lecturer and his very young, ex-student wife. Finally she gets intimate with another loner which leads to a bizarre and perilous day playing truant.

This is a strange story but it is beautifully told. In particular, the character of the father is drawn with almost perfect observation of his mannerisms and foibles.

The first quarter of the book, and it is almost exactly 25%, the first Act if you will describes the idyllic world of Natalie. Much of this first act is set in a garden and describes the innocence of the Garden of Eden:

• “It was a beautiful morning, and the garden seems to be enjoying it.”

The narration is through Natalie and we are privileged to hear the thoughts in her head. In the first act, presaging the loss of innocence, she indulges in a fantasy of being interrogated by a detective about the dead body that she found in the rose garden but we also hear her other thoughts, often suggesting a rebellion from the cosiness of her world:

• “Seventeen years was a very long time to have been alive, if you took it into proportion by the thought that in seventeen years more - or as long as she had wasted being a child, and a small girl, silly and probably playing - she would be thirty-four, and old. Married, probably. Perhaps - and the thought was nauseating - senselessly afflicted with children of her own. Worn, and tired.” 
• “She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method - imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burnt alive.”
• “‘Do you know when you're being honest?’ ... ‘If I'm surprised at myself for saying or thinking it, it's honest.’”
• “The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.”
• “I hardly think that the taking of cocktails and such is a vice which I shall ever indulge in more than very mildly, since it seems to me that any woman interested in an artistic career dulls the fine, keen edge of her understanding by an indulgence in a stimulant other than her work.”

We also learn about her family. This is a savage portrait of a family, happy from the male point of view. Her younger brother [because he is male, we infer] is able to declare that he will not be available for the usual Sunday afternoon gathering. But there is a stunning contrast between the smugly complacent father, secure in his role as patriarch, and the neurotic drunk of a mother who is utterly disillusioned about being a wife. 

• Father:
• “Mr Arnold Waite - husband, parent, man of his word - invariably leaned back in his chair after his second cup of breakfast coffee and looked with some disbelief at his wife and two children. His chair was situated so that when he put his head back the sunlight, winter or summer, touched his own faded hair with an air at once angelic and indifferent - indifferent because, like himself, it found belief not an essential factor to its continued existence.” (opening lines)
• “The books which stood expectantly on the shelves around the room had the fulfilled look of books which have been read, though not necessarily by Mr Waite.”
• He is even smug about his failings: “My honest picture of myself has led me to aim less high than many of my contemporaries, because I know my own failings, and as a result I am in many respects less successful in a worldly sense. They, without knowledge of their own shortcomings, were able to conquer blindly, while I, always hesitating through doubt of myself, lost my chances, and fell.” [This is a  useful correction to the Dephi oracle’s Know Thyself.]
• Natalie's mother toils all day in the kitchen to prepare the food for the Sunday afternoon parties (Natalie, being a girl, helps). Her only resistance is a refusal to prepare Sunday lunch so that the father has to grumble that his "peanut-butter sandwich  ... is not food for a grown man."
• “The kitchen was, in fact, the only place in the house that Mrs Waite possessed utterly; even her bedroom was not her own, since her husband magnanimously insisted upon sharing it.”
• “This morning Mrs Waite’s initial momentum came from her Sunday casserole which, incredibly complex and delicate, would be devoured drunkenly in a few hours by inconsiderate and uncomplimentary people.”
• “I wish Ethel would leave dishes the way I leave them. Little ones inside big ones. It's impossible to believe that anyone can put dishes away in this sort of insane arrangement; she piles them altogether without thinking of size or safety.”
• “See that your marriage is happy, child. Don't ever let your husband know what you're thinking or doing, that's the way.”
• “This is the only life I've got - you understand? I mean, this is all.”
• “First they tell you lies ... and then they make you believe them. Then they give you a little of what they promised, just a little, enough to keep you thinking you've got your hands on it. Then you find out that you’re tricked, just like everyone else.”
• “Everyone only knows one ‘I’, and that's the ‘I’ they call themselves, and there's no one else can be ‘I’ to anyone except that one person, and they're all stuck with themselves.”
• “If I were dead you’d listen to me.”

This garden of innocence is brought to an abrupt halt at the 25% mark when Natalie, wandering through the woods with a strange man at the party, suddenly realises "Oh my dear God sweet Christ ... so sickened that she nearly said it aloud, is he going to touch me?" There is then a space and a few pages of description of how she wakes, feeling sick, repeatedly telling herself that she won't think about it, repeatedly thinking "Nothing happened ... nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened. Nothing happened."These few pages are a tour de force of writing but this whole section is controlled and brilliant. Much of the power comes from the repetition of "nothing happened" and "I won't think about it" and "oh, please" and later "the echo 'please, please, please". Haunting writing.

At the end of this section Mr Waite, haloed again in sunlight, complacently unaware of what has happened to Natalie, puts the blame on his wife: "Your God ... has seen fit to give us a black and rotten day." Soon Natalie will be expelled from Eden (sent to the college her father has picked out for her) to undergo more difficult experiences.

The second section starts with the statement: "Anything which begins new and fresh will finally become old and silly." This quarter (Act 2) describes another closed world, that of the all-girls' college to which Natalie has been sent by her father. Here Natalie meets Arthur Langdon, an English lecturer, and his wife, an ex-student and a drunk, and we see Natalie's parents reflected in this portrait of a marriage about to go wrong. At the same time Natalie finds herself ostracised by the student body, except perhaps for one girl who is also ostracised but swiftly finds a way of getting back into the mainstream and ditching Natalie, and she becomes an Outsider in the Colin Wilson sense. This is quite a contrast with her position at the heart of a close family but it reflects her psychological outsiderness which was shown in the first section by her interior monologue. The second quarter ends with the wife, Elizabeth, starting a fire accidentally (as Natalie believes) or on purpose (as Elizabeth claims, telling her husband "I tried to kill myself again").

Great moments form the second section include:

• “The poor ones, with their obvious best clothes, the smart ones, with their obvious right clothes, the girls who would teach the others to dance, the girls who would whisper inaccurate facts of life, the girls would fail all their courses and go home ingloriously ( saying goodbye bravely, but crying), the girls would fail all their courses and join the best cliques, the girls who would fall in love with their professors, either desperately and secretly, or openly and disgracefully, the girls whose hearts would breaks and the girls whose spirits would break”
• “Once the door was opened the world outside it slowly established itself, small section after small section - as though, in fact, it has not been prepared tonight for Natalie to open her door again, and had been caught completely unaware, and was putting a bold face on things and getting everything back together as quickly as possible.”
• “Can you imagine having a mind like mine and losing it when you die?”
• “It was generally believed that it was completely possible to become pregnant by using the same bathtub as one's brother, although not necessarily at the same time.”
• “Mustn't violate the sacred rules of magic ... Never wish for anything until it's ready for you. Never try to make anything happen until it's on its way.”

In the third quarter Natalie has more strange experiences at College. Someone starts stealing things and Natalie gets the blame although there is a moment of mad horror when she meets the thief. She is rescued by Tony, another ostracised girl.

• "a spot where two people have been talking, however briefly, is not after that a spot for one person to sit alone."

The fourth quarter starts with Natalie returning home for Thanksgiving. Her experiences at college have estranged her from her family and she is no longer able to accept their psychological support. “She had come home ... bringing with her a certain sense of romance, as one who could bring heartbreaking stories of haunted lands, who have seen and heard and touched and known the improbable, the unbelievable ... who had seen, perhaps, beasts walking like men and jewels shining like stars, and who smiled at certain remembered scenes a million miles away, and stared bewildered at old familiar sights and found the faces of mother and father and brother more strange than the face on a carving made in pearl.” The genie is out of the bottle: once innocence is lost it can never be retrieved; she is banned forever from returning to Eden.

Her work is already suffering and after this visit she will stop attending class and spend all her days with the mysterious Tony.

Half way through this last section she truants from school and spends the day in town with Tony. They go into town and Natalie creates imaginary fantasies about the secret lives of the people in the cafe and whether or not she is being tracked by spies. On the bus, however, she feels that the people are just robots: “It seems pitiful that these automatons should be created and wasted, never knowing more than minor fragment of the pattern in which they were involved.” The end of the bus route is a dark wood by a lake near an amusement park (this very much echoes the garden at home when Natalie leaves the party to go into between the trees with the strange man). Natalie and Tony go into the wood and get separated and Natalie becomes lost: “Beneath the trees it was not dark as a room is dark when the lights are put out, the artificial darkness which comes when artificial light is gone; it was the deep natural darkness which comes with a forsaking of natural light.” This darkness is spiritual as it is physical. Now Tony is strange and wants to go on, but not very far, and Natalie becomes all normal and cross, stamping her feet in the mud and hating the fact that she is cold and wet. And Tony tells Natalie "Don't be afraid" and Natalie is immediately "suddenly very frightened".

• “We are on a carpet ... It unrolls in front of us, but in back of us it rolls up and there is nothing under it.” 

This is a novel about growing up. It is full of terrifying rites of passage, for example: the climactic moment at the end of the first quarter, the initiation scene at college in the second quarter, the encounter with the thief in the third quarter, what happens with Tony in the woods.

It was published in the same year as Catcher in the Rye (1951) and could be seen as a female counterpoint to that story. It's a coming of age story but there is also one heck of a feminist punch.

May 2019; 218 pages

Another book by Shirley Jackson is the creepy We have always lived in the castle

Other books about college in America are:

•  The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis

"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

"Sanctuary" by William Faulkner

The story starts with a stand off between Horace Benbow, a lawyer, and Popeye. Popeye has a pistol in his pocket, Horace has a book. Popeye takes him to Lee Goodwin's bootlegging place where Horace meets Lee's common law wife (who admits to prostituting herself to get a lawyer to get Lee out of jail once) and her baby, and Tommy. Popeye is a complex character who, Tommy says, is the "skeeriest durn white man I ever see", who is spooked by owls and by a little dog he once shot dead. As Tommy says, Popeye is "skeered of his own shadow" and as Benbow replies: "I'd be scared of it too ... if his shadow was mine."

The next day Horace (who is separated from his wife Belle and his step-daughter Little Belle) is with his respectable family in Jefferson discussing his widowed sister's new toy boy, Gowan Stevens, who learnt to drink at college and thinks that made him a gentleman.

Now the main action starts. Gowan meets Temple Drake, a young college girl, who is playing hookey, and they drive off but Gowan is drinking and he crashes the car. They are taken to Lee the bootlegger's house. And this starts a strange, dream-like (nightmare-like) sequence in which Temple, terrified by the threat that these people represent (Tommy the negro, the psychotic Popeye, Lee, even Lee's blind old dad) runs around from one place to the next but never actually does what Lee's woman advises her to, which is to run away from the house and keep running. Gowan gets drunker, has a fight with Lee's man Van, spends the night asleep and in the morning walks off, finds a town, arranges for a car to collect Temple, and then keeps moving, ashamed of himself but unable to return. Then Popeye shoots Tommy to get to Temple and Temple screams "Something is happening to me!" It is only much later that we discover precisely what.

Horace is now defending Lee who is accused of Tommy's murder. At the same time Horace is looking after Lee's wife but his sister refuses to let him look after her in the house they jointly own so he puts her into a hotel until she is run out of that by the church-going ladies of the town who are spreading rumours that Horace is sleeping with Lee's wife; the woman and her baby take refuge in the prison where Lee refuses to tell anyone about Popeye because Lee is scared that Popeye will seek him out and kill him. Feeling is running against Lee. Horace quotes the local preacher as suggesting "that Goodwin and his wife should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of it being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it." This is a grisly breadcrumb.

Meanwhile Popeye has taken Temple, who is bleeding heavily, to a brothel in Memphis (where there is "a line of office buildings terraced sharply against the sunfilled sky") where the madam, Miss Reba, moving "heavily from thigh to thigh", fat and short of breath, with two little pet dogs who know to be sacred of her when she returns from the cemetery where her man is buried (a wonderful character; she says that "you have to be born for this [prostitution] like you have to be born to be a butcher or a barber, I guess. Wouldn't anybody be either of them just for money or fun".) arranges for a doctor to help with the blood still coming from Temple's loins.

Suddenly, almost exactly half way through the book, we have a comic interlude. Two young lads, innocents, impoverished freshmen, arrive in Memphis and take lodgings at Miss Reba's brothel, thinking that it is a hotel. When they visit a brothel, one complaining that the experience costs three dollars and "ain't nothing worth three dollars you cain't tote off with you") elsewhere they have to sneak back in to their 'hotel' where all the ladies are married in case the proprietress discovers they have been naughty and throws them out! These lads are the reason that their uncle, a wonderfully venal state senator who dispenses cheap cigars to patronise poor people (they see right through him; they distrust him and dislike him), discovers the whereabouts of Temple, selling the information to Horace (and presumably elsewhere as well). When Horace finds her she tells him what happened although it is written to keep the reader guessing about the exact details: "It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward.  ... I could feel the jerking going on in my knickers ahead of his hand..."

The twist comes in the courtroom and we discover exactly what happened to Temple in the subsequent lynching.

This is a fabulous book.

The plot is gripping, starting tense, becoming tenser, and the aftermath playing out in detail, with that wonderful comic interlude at almost exactly half way through.

The characters are perfect. It is only right at the end that we understand what has crippled Popeye's moral senses; we can pity even this personification of evil. Temple is a victim who, to some extent, colludes in her own victimhood, but at the same time she can be lustful and vengeful and cruel; she can be wicked but she is destroyed by what happens to her. Miss Reba is a brilliant madame with a wonderful love hate relationship with her dogs. And Senator Snopes is a perfect cameo.

There are some brilliant lines, including:

• Perhaps it is on the instant that we realise, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we die.
• Time's not such a bad thing after all. Use it right, and you can stretch anything out, like a rubber band, until it busts somewhere, and there you are, with all tragedy and despair in two little knots between thumb and finger of each hand.
• The smoke-colored twilight emerged in slow puffs like signal smoke from a blanket.
• People don't break the law just for a holiday
• God is foolish at times, but at least He's a gentleman [says the lawyer but the ex-prostitute replies] I always thought of Him as a man
• It does last ... Spring does. You'd almost think there was some purpose to it.
• Night is hard on old people.
• like a thin coating of tortured Tchaikovsky on a slice of stale bread

But the power of this book comes from the portrayal of society. The respectable people condemn the criminal underclass while at the same time using them. But it is when the two societies meet that tragedy occurs.

Stunning. July 2016; 219 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

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

"The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath

Lee Miller's photo of Tanja Ramm's head 'in' a Bell Jar taken in Paris in 1931. I wonder whether Sylvia Plath had this iconic picture in mind when she entitled her novel.

The more I read the more I find wonderful books that make me wonder why I hadn't read them a long, long time ago. Of course I had heard of the Bell Jar but I had avoided it. The author had been the wife of the British poet Ted Hughes. We had to read his poems at school (because they were about animals which were supposed to appeal to us).

It is a novel about an American girl who has a nervous breakdown, attempts suicide and winds up getting electric shock treatment in a mental hospital. I suppose it is a sort of Voyage and Return (as described by Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots); the voyage into madness being the liminality.

The first half of the book (46%) concerns Esther's stay in New York where she had one a prize and has a month in a hotel as a guest of a magazine (with a lot more girls). She has always dreamed of being a writer. She parties, remembers her boyfriend, gets food poisoning, and parties some more. I loved this section of the book. The writing was crisp and witty with some wonderful observations told in the way that only a poet can. Then she goes back home to live with her mother. She is rejected from the college summer vacation writing course so she has nothing to do. Her boyfriend (she doesn't really like him and she is determined never to marry him since she has discovered he has had an affair with a waitress) who is a medical student has contracted TB and is in a sanatorium. She stops washing and stops sleeping. She starts working out ways to kill herself. Finally she takes a bottle full of sleeping pills but she is found alive and put into a mental hospital.

Selected quotes:

• "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves." (Ch 1: a brilliant first paragraph, fabulously foreshadowing her electro-shock treatment at the mental hospital.)
• "I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of all the surrounding hullabaloo." (Ch 1)
• "The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence." (Ch 1)
• "The china-white bedside telephone could have connected me up with things, but there it sat, dumb as a death's head." (Ch 2)
• "I think I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature." (Ch 2)
• "If you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance ... you can get away with it." (Ch 3)
• "I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards." (Ch 9)
• "A man in the country club stepped up to the mike and started shaking those seedpod rattles that mean South American music." (Ch 9) (See, she can be funny as well!)
• "Women-haters were like the gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended and then they disappeared. You could never catch one." (Ch 9)
• "The white, shining, identical clapboard houses with their interstices of well-groomed green proceeded past, one bar after another in a large but escape-proof cage." (Ch 10)
• "The voice on the loudspeaker went bockle bockle bockle, the way they do, so you can't understand a word, and then, in the middle of all the static, I heard a familiar name clear as A on the piano in the middle of all the tuning instruments of an orchestra." (Ch 11)
• "His name was Cal, which I thought must be short for something, but I couldn't think what it would be short for, unless it was California." (Ch 13 - more laughter)
• "The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you." (Ch 13)
• The crazy nun "kept hearing harp notes in her ears and a voice saying over and over, 'Alleluia!' Only she wasn't sure, on being closely questioned, whether the voice was saying Alleluia or Arizona." (Ch 13 - I laughed out loud at this point, something very very few books make me do).

The funniest book about madness I have ever read. The scary thing is how normal and mundane her behaviour is.

But the best thing about this wonderful book is the beautiful prose.

Rated 85th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time

April 2016; 234 pages

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

"Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys

This is the prequel to Jane Eyre, the story of Antoinette Cosway, later Antoinette Mason, later Bertha Mason, the first wife of Mr Rochester. It starts with her childhood; she lives with her mother on a decaying plantation surrounded by newly liberated and angry slaves. They are burnt out of their home and rescued by Mr Mason who marries Antoinette's mother who then goes mad. Following her step-father's death, Antoinette is 'sold' to Mr Rochester, a second son in need of money who marries her for her extensive dowry. An idyllic honeymoon goes sour when accusations are made about Antoinette's ancestry (the letter arrives almost exactly half way through the book) which suggest hereditary insanity (possibly caused by white blood tainted with black?). Mr Rochester (never explicitly named), once an attentive lover, becomes distant. She tries to win him back with Obeah and love potions which he perceives as an attempt to poison him; he shags a servant girl. Antoinette, called Bertha by her husband, goes mad and is taken to England. The final part of the book is narrated by Grace Poole, her keeper.

There were moments of extraordinary beauty in the book. The descriptions of the colourful and shrieking West Indian countryside were perfect and sometimes made perfect metaphors: "small pale flowers too fragile to resist the wind". Yet somehow the physicality enters with Mr R: perhaps it is because his part, part two, is the section which deals with two young adults on their honeymoon whilst section one deals with the perceptions of a child. There were wonderful moments: "The rain began to drip down the back of my neck adding to my feeling of discomfort and melancholy."; A man who has "A magnificent body and a foolish conceited face."; "The room was full of the scent of crushed flowers" )after Mr R has stepped on a wreath of frangipani; interesting use for wreath which can be for bridegrooms or, as the dialogue suggests, for emperors but can also betoken funerals).

The unreliable narrator is very much to the fore. Given that one of the narrators (Antoinette) goes mad and that there seems to be blame attached to the other main narrator (Mr R), this could scarcely not be the case. But the whole damn island is full of lies. Mr R finds a road in the jungle and asks one of the West Indians: "No road" is the reply. Blank denial,  bare-faced lying. These people all lie and not just the blacks but all of them. There is never any idea of what might be the truth.

One of my favourite lines is: "I was young then. A short youth mine was."

A very interesting, very short novel. February 2016; 123 pages

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began (1923). A BBC poll rated it 53rd best ever novel.

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