"Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel" by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Thousand Acres which updated King Lear and transported it to Iowa. In this book she reads a hundred novels, written over a thousand years, and tries to distil from her reading ideas of what makes a novel.

Are there 13 ways? I rather lost count. There are thirteen chapters but they include the Introduction and an explanation of how she set about her three year readathon. The clock that she imagines in chapter 9, the Circle of the Novel, lists 12 aspects of a novel. My notes on her ideas combine rather more than thirteen ideas. I must have missed the tabulation.

But some of her ideas are fascinating and inspiring to one who, like myself. aspires to write a novel (and to write worthwhile critiques of the novels I have read in this blog).

However, I would sound a note of caution. In the final analysis, Smiley appears to believe that the novel is fundamentally individualistic and stands up for the rights of the individual against the conformity-seeking group. For example, in her chapter on the art of the novel she asserts that “The novel is always about freedom” and argues that “societies have only a few basic categories of work, and four of them are government, religion, daily survival, and nurturing the next generation. Each of these functions requires group effort, and in each it is essential that the individual subordinate himself or herself to the discipline of the group. A fifth category, apparently present in almost every human society, is the making of art (including the telling of stories). In this category, idiosyncrasy is prized, in part because art is perceived as play and is supposed to be ... fun.” Her arguments are persuasive; her examples all suggest that this is so. I just wondered whether Smiley would have been quite so certain of this thesis if she hadn't been brought up in the USA with its emphasis on the individual and freedom and the rights of the individual against the state, and was brought up instead in a society such as China and Japan where the needs of the group may be paramount. The history of western literature may support Smiley, and of course she could define the novel as quintessentially an artistic work within the canon of western literature, but perhaps there is another way of looking at extended prose fictions outside of that particular box.

She starts by defining the novel as “a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” Each of these aspects affects what novels are and what they can do. For example, prose becomes possible because the novel is written; lengthy oral traditions such as epic require poetry as an aid to memory. Prose, she says later, "is for exploring what is unique about situations and characters - we might say that prose is ‘Aristotelian’. Poetry is for exploring what incidents and persons typify - it is ‘Platonic’.” The length also enables in-depth studies of characters within contexts.

She identifies twelves styles of discourse that a novel may contain, and she suggests that the great novels contain many of these styles: Travel, History, Biography, Tale, Joke, Gossip, Diary or letter, Confession, Polemic, Essay, Epic, and Romance.

Plots, she says, come in four bits:

• Exposition in the first 10%
• Rising action during which “Something that seems implausible at the time of the exposition - the climax - is being prepared for. ... The novel becomes more and more different from life.”
• Climax (at the 90% point). This is where, for example, Tom Jones is about to be hanged and Madame Bovary poisons herself
• Denouement.

But she also points out that (and here she is very precise) “Almost every novel gathers itself at the 62% 

mark, changes strategy, and freshens. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Bob Ewell lies on the stand about seeing Tom and his daughter having sex. ... In Madame Bovary Emma ... goes to see her first opera ... which quickens her romantic yearnings.”

It is interesting to compare these ideas with, for example, The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler, Inside Story by Dara Marks, and Into the Woods by John Yorke which borrow from film the idea of a three-act structure in which the turning points come at the 25%, 50% and 75% points.

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking book about novels.

Some great lines:

• “My philosophical stance was one of not knowing any answers and not believing that there were any answers.” (Introduction)
• “It was like dating someone new who was nice enough but not nearly as exciting as the old boyfriend who had moved to Europe.” (Introduction)
• “The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give up accuracy in the pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact.” (What is a novel?)
• “The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence - verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm).” (Who is a novelist?)
• “A novel is a hypothesis. A novelist shares with a scientist the wish to observe. The novelist also shares with the scientist a partial and imperfect knowledge of the phenomenon he wishes to observe. And so both novelist and scientist say ‘what if?’” (Who is a novelist?)
• “The novel ... is a theory of being. A novel proposes that the world has a certain mode of existing. It doesn't propose this by asserting it explicitly, but by depicting it implicitly.” (Who is a novelist?)
• “The novelist has many pleasures to offer - the unusual pleasure of the exotic, the intellectual pleasure of historical understanding, the humane pleasure of psychological insight into one or more characters, the simple pleasure of entertainment and suspense, the exuberant pleasure of laughter and trickery, the guilty pleasure of gossip, the tempting pleasure of secrecy and intimacy, the confessional pleasure of acknowledged sin and attempted redemption, the polemical pleasure of indignation, the rigorous pleasure of intellectual analysis, the reassuring pleasure of identification with one's nation or people, and the vicarious pleasure of romance.” (The psychology of the novel)
• “Heathcliff is rude by choice. Since charm is one of the qualities that keeps readers reading, Heathcliff's rudeness has to be compensated for, and it never is.” (Morality and the novel)
• "When the literary culture at large tries to impose an answer by insisting that ‘authenticity’ resides in the sex or the ethnic or national origin or biographical experience of the author, it kills the very thing that makes the literary culture vibrant, which is the sense of freedom, vitality, and power the author feels while he is creating his work.” (The art of the novel)
• “The underlying assertion of almost every novel is that meaning exists and can be understood because it can be arranged in a sequence that then takes on some sort of logic.” (The novel and history)
• “We seem to live in a world now where all thoughts are focused on the idea of prevailing, of imposing one's beliefs on others, and no thoughts, no thoughts are given to the costs of prevailing, or even what it means. Have these people never read Moby-Dick? well, no, they haven’t.” (The novel and history)
• “Those who don't read novels are condemned to repeat the oldest mistakes in literature - the mistake of hubris, a Greek mistake, and the mistake of attributing one's own emotions to God, a Judeo-Christian-Islamic mistake.” (The novel and history)
• “If the novel has died for the bureaucrats who run our country, then they are more likely not to pause before engaging in arrogant, narcissistic, and foolish policies.” (The novel and history)
• “Freud maintained that the two great human endeavours are love and work. ... In many novels work exists more as furniture than motivation.” (The circle of the novel)
• “Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.” (A novel of your own (I))

August 2019; 570 pages

"Whose Body" by Dorothy L Sayers

A classic murder mystery, the first in the series of novels written by DLS starring her aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

Although it is more or less obvious from a very early stage whodunnit, and the character of Wimsey is extraordinary, this is a tale told with such panache that I could enjoy every moment.

There is instant development of Lord Peter, a shell-shocked ex-Major who had experienced both trench warfare and intelligence work during the First World War, and his devoted manservant Bunter, who had looked after his lordship in the trenches, and whose contributions to the sleuthing process combined photography and the ability to go downstairs and gossip with the servants. Scotland Yard policeman Parker also makes an appearance as does Peter's brother Gerald.

Some great lines:

• "On the dead face the handsome pair of gold pince-nez mocked death with grotesque elegance." (C 1)
• "Lord Peter had a funny way of talking about books ... as if the author had confided in him beforehand, and told him how the story was put together, and which bit was written first." (C 10)

August 2019; 214 pages

I have set myself the task of reading all the Lord Peter Wimsey novels (mostly again) in order. The ones I have read and reviewed in this blog so far include:

• Whose Body in which my Lord and his manservant are introduced
• Clouds of Witness in which Lord Peter must sleuth to get his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, off a murder charge
• Unnatural Death which introduces another Wimsey sidekick: Miss Climpson
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
• Strong Poison which introduces Harriet Vane, a detective writer who becomes Lord Peter's love interest
• The Five Red Herrings; Lord Peter in Scotland
• Have His Carcase: Harriet and Peter investigate the death of a gigolo with dreams

There are also Wimsey books written since the death of DLS by Jill Paton Walsh. These include:

• The Attenbury Emeralds in which Lord Peter, in 1951, recalls the circumstances of his first case, the Attenbury Emeralds, which have gone missing again.
• The Late Scholar: in which Wimsey returns to Oxford

"Marlborough" by Richard Holmes

A fascinating biography of the British general who betrayed his friend, his monarch and the father of his sister's children during the Glorious Revolution and went on to win battle after battle during the War of Spanish Succession.

Full of fascinating glimpses of a bygone age:

• “A guinea was worth thirty shillings prior to the recoinage in 1696 and twenty-one shillings thereafter.”
• “In 1703 five dragoon broadswords cost £24 Scots, but just £2 Sterling.”
• Louis XIV refused Prince Eugène a commission because “there were rumours that Eugène had been too fond of other pages at court; his mother, caught up in accusations of witchcraft, was someone the king now regarded with horror, and in any case the lad was shockingly ugly.”
• “High temper rarely makes a successful contribution to labour relations on a building site.”
• “‘Captain’ Peter Drake served in the Spanish, Dutch, English and hahaFrench armies, often joining one without having completed the tiresome formalities which might properly have accompanied his discharge from another.”
• As a young man M enjoyed the favours of the by then aging and experienced Barbara Castlemaine who had been (and potentially still was) one of the mistresses of Charles II. She gave him a handsome £5000 present (possibly because of his gallantry in leaving her bedroom via the window when the King came to call) and a daughter (who later became a nun who had a child by James Douglas, Earl of Arran). Her other lovers included the playwright William Wycherley, and property developer Henry Jermyn. (C 1)
• The mother of Sarah Jennings, who became the wife of Marlborough, was accused of witchcraft: “She was certainly evil-tempered, may actually have been unhinged, and some suggested that she dabbled in the black arts and the procurement of that commodity most sought after by the court, pretty girls.” (C 2)
• When Queen Mary reminded Catherine Sedley that she had been one of the mistresses of James II, Catherine replied: “If I broke one of the commandments with your father, you have broken another against him.” (C 2)
• “We may doubt whether a tiny village like Westonzoyland actually contained sufficient alcohol to induce widespread drunkenness, even if the royal army was unfamiliar with the foot-tangling attributes of the local cider.” (C 2)
• When Anne succeeded William III she immediately sacked William’s chief minister Lord Romsey “though the broad arrow from his coat of arms long survived as an emblem of government property.” (C 4)
• The military ‘tattoo’ was originally a drum-beat designed to call soldiers back to camp from the local villages “its name derived from the Dutch doe ten tap toe ... ‘turn off the tap’ of the wine or beer barrel.” (C 4)
• When captured French general Marshal Tallard was a prisoner in Nottingham he grew celery, introducing it to England. (C 5)
• Q Anne sat either on her throne in Parliament or, when it was cold, on a bench by the fire. (C 6)
• “There is a hoary old tale of a bear-keeper who, hoping to administer physic to the creature, placed the potion in a piece of rolled-up paper, inserted one end into the bear’s mouth and the other into his own, and prepared to blow. The bear, alas, blew first.” (C 6)
• Marlborough’s daughter Henrietta, who became 2nd Duchess after his death, probably had a child by poet William Congreve after visiting Bath whose waters had “a wonderful influence on barren ladies, who often prove with child, even in their husbands’ absence.” (C 8)

August 2017; 482 pages

Richard Holmes has also written:

• The Age of Wonder: a brilliant history of the inventions of the late 1700s and early 1800s
• Coleridge: Early Visions: an excellent biography of the poet.

Another book of military history set in the same era (and also including the Battle of Sedgemoor) is All the King's Men by Saul David.

"The Rules of Attraction" by Brett Easton Ellis

Rich Americans behaving badly. Young adults enjoy themselves at a college in New England by taking large amounts of drugs and by sleeping around. This book leaves one with a feeling that these people have no morality and are, perhaps as a result, floundering desperately, seeking love and finding only meaningless sex in an utterly nihilistic society. It starts with a girl who loses her virginity to two boys, one from the college and one from the town, whilst herself being unconscious because of drugs. Perhaps the only character who explicitly seeks love commits suicide. It is all very depressing. One fears for the generation depicted (who were the last generation before mobile phones).

The story is told in multiple points of view, each introduced by the narrator's name. There are no formal chapter headings.

Intriguingly, this novel parallels The Secret History by Donna Tartt. There is an oblique reference to it on page 160: "that weird Classics group (and they're probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals)". Tartt and Easton Ellis knew one another.

When the novel starts Lauren is missing Victor, her boyfriend, who is spending a term in Europe (where he has slept around with both boys and girls, principally in order to find a bed for the night, or transport to his next bed, despite the fact that he is presumably sufficiently well off to be able to travel without worry). But Lauren's love for Victor doesn't stop her fancying Paul and sleeping with Sean.

Paul, though from time to time he sleeps with girls such as Lauren, is principally gay and has got a crush on Sean. He and Sean indulge in an affair lasting most of the second quarter of the book.

But Sean, who is dealing drugs and running up debts with the townie drug dealer, despite his private fortune and rich, dying father,  is really not interested in Paul. He wants Lauren, with whom he has a relationship for the third quarter of the book. Sean is, initially, incredibly cynical and talks about "fucking" girls as if they were nothing more than the passive victims of his needs. He lies to Paul and finds Paul little more than a nuisance to be discarded as soon as he finds a love. Yet it is Sean who ends up jealous and heart-broken over Lauren and it is Sean who says: "If you can't make a girl come why even bother? That always seemed to me to be like writing questions in a letter." (p 139)

So Paul wants Sean who wants Lauren (triggered by the fact that he thinks she is the author of the love letters sent to him) who wants Victor. As Paul says near the end: "No one ever likes the right person." (p 261) Even the adults, as represented by the parents and teachers, flit from relationship to relationship, though they are rather more concerned with preserving a facade of respectability.

If anything it is about the cruelty of an object of desire when he or she is unaware (or doesn't care).

Great quotes:

• "Beautiful, slow-witted Dance majors writhing about shamelessly." (p 21)
• "So much attention paid, so much detail studied, worked over so hard that he loses it all."
• "I sat there feeling like the hapless lover. But then I remembered, of course, that now I'm only hapless." (p 39)
• "It always seemed that there was just one minute left, all the time." (p 86)
• "I browse through the porno magazine rack that's placed next to the Oral Hygiene section." (p 215): This dates the novel to those last moments before internet pornography.

August 2019; 283 pages

Bret Easton Ellis also wrote: 

Less Than Zero, his debut

American Psycho, narrated by Sean Bateman's elder brother Patrick, an investment banker (and serial killer?) in Manhattan

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

"My sister the serial killer" by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction and long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize. Winner of the 2020 crime/thriller prize in the British Book Awards.

"Ayola summons me with these words - Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again."

It is the last word on this, the first page, that hooks. This is not the first killing. And thus the book immediately lives up to the promise of its title.

Korede immediately hurries over to the flat with bleach to clear the mess and to help her sister remove the corpse.

Korede is a nurse, the elder sister, practical and efficient but not blessed with beauty. Ayola is stunningly attractive, full of a beauty that makes normal sane rational men become obsessed. The two sisters were physically abused by their bullying father, almost as a by-product of his making a fortune (he is contemplating exploiting Ayola's beauty in the marriage market for his own financial gain when he dies). He has bequeathed to Ayola a knife with which she dispatches her boyfriends. Then, one day, the handsome doctor for whom Korede lusts, meets Ayola and falls under her spell. Should Korede denounce her sister to save the doctor's life?

A book whose theme is the unfairness of genetics in a world where the beautiful always get more than their fair share of everything. Korede has learned to be cynical about a cynical world where the cops are always open to bribery, where men are invariably predatory ("When you have money, university girls are to men what plankton is to a whale." p 107), where you have to play dirty to survive. In some ways Ayola is the supreme feminist, exploiting her beauty on Instagram, and ruthlessly murdering boyfriends when she is tired of them ... and Korede's protective instincts help her little sister get away with murder. But how long can this last before it all comes tumbling down?

Some great lines:

• "It takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul." (p 10)
• "It was a shame to think that death would whittle away at his broad shoulders and concave abs, until he was nothing more than bone." (p 10)
• "He had hoped his generous act and his artistic talents would secure him a place in her heart, or at the very least a place in her bed, but he was short and had teeth that were fighting for space in his mouth. So all it got him was a pat on the head and a can of coke."
• "She is beached on the sofa in the downstairs living room, reading a Mills & Boon novel - a tale of the type of love she has never known." (p 41)
• "When he is not singing, he is humming, and when he tires of that, he whistles. He is a walking music box." (p 46)
• "Her mother twists her wedding ring with her finger, as though contemplating taking it off." (p 49)
• "Chichi will spread the news before I have finished telling it." (p 73)
• "I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass." (p 82)
• "He had several girlfriends in various universities across Lagos. ... He once told me you had to feed the cow before you slaughtered it." (p 107)

A fast-paced (tiny chapters) but beautifully written novel.

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

August 2017; 223 pages

A review by  Nic James for Thanet Writers makes some interesting points: "Korede’s need to protect her sister is such a compulsion that I wanted some more exploration of exactly why she continued to act in such a way for a person who clearly cared about no one but herself." He also suggested that the narrator had "very few endearing qualities. Her crush on Tade seemed pretty shallow, and her inner monologue was full of constant scorn for the people around her. As a result it was difficult to care about either sister."

"Umbrae Vergilianae" by Robert Bush

This delightful little book, published in a limited edition of just seventy copies, explores the use of the word umbra in the Aeneid. The introduction tells us that "The word umbra recurs throughout the Aeneid ... it appears seventy times, at least once in each of the twelve books ...Umbra has some of the range of meanings of our word 'shade'. ... most often it denotes forbidding gloom."

Each selected umbra appears with an illustration created by "soaking sheets of Khadi paper  ... in Chinese ink of various strength and working on them with water, ink, charcoal and white chalk."

The deep love of the author for this epic poem is embodied in the care and attention lavished on this extraordinary work. Only seventy copies have been published and a cheap paperback may sell millions and it may be that the cheap paperback is a work of art and of beauty but this is certainly a work of love, of art, and of beauty.

August 2019;

Another book about Virgil's Aenid is by David Ross

"The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

This best-selling novel is a cross between The Great Gatsby and Crime and Punishment set in a New England college. In some ways it is linked to The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis.

You are hooked immediately when the Prologue describes the murder of Bunny by a group which includes the narrator (another book with the murder placed right at the start is Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). The first half of the novel then describes the events leading up to this murder, the second half the consequences.

The story is narrated by Richard, the poor outsider, as Gatsby is narrated by Nick Caraway. He moves to an expensive college on a scholarship. College life which is a whirl of hedonism, featuring alcohol, drugs and a little sex. But Richard is seduced by the mystique of a small elite group of classics students. They have cars, apartments in town, and a big country house. Richard fancies Camilla, twin sister of Charles, but he is most overawed by Henry, the richest member of the group who is a natural linguist. The outsider, also rich with the use of a country estate, is gay Francis. Richard manages to join this group but always feels an outsider. The first person to properly welcome him (although in an attempt to exploit him) is Bunny, the only member of the group to have a nickname, who is destined to become the murder victim.

This tiny class is  taught by Julian Morrow, a teacher whose life has included rubbing shoulders with everyone from George Orwell to royalty. Morrow's teaching style is extraordinary, he hothouses a small elite (perhaps a touch of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie here). Right at the start the teacher, Julian, tells them “It is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channelling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue.” (C 1) But it is when they try to get fully in touch with their primitive impulses, by recreating a moment from the Bacchae of Euripides, that triggers the disaster that leads to the murder of Bunny.

The book then swings into Crime and Punishment: at one stage, confronting the victim's family, the narrator makes a direct reference, quoting “It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.”  (C 7). The guilt and pressure are relentless, at their worst when the group attend the victim's funeral (Henry is even a pall-bearer). In chapter one the teacher, Julian, had discussed with the class the Furies, the Greek goddesses who wreaked vengeance on murderers by driving them mad: “How did they [the Furies] drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it." This becomes a prediction as each of the killers is pursued by guilt in their own way: Charles becomes an alcoholic, Henry retreats into obsessive gardening, Francis becomes even more reclusive, Richard drinks and takes drugs.

In many ways this can be seen as a classic Greek tragedy as outlined by Aristotle: young people, fundamentally good but with natural human weaknesses, thirsting for knowledge commit a terrible crime; the rest of the story unfolds with relentless logic; even the reversal at the end is, as Aristotle required, whilst surprising, an inevitable consequence of the characterisations.

It is a brilliant story written superbly. There are moments of stunning writing:

• Here are three moments when Bunny's body has just been discovered:
• “My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own.” (C 6) In times of stress a common experience is to discover that your body feels alien; this also references the essentially meat-like quality of a corpse.
• “I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew ... a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.” (C 6)
• “An old shoe was lying on the asphalt in front of the loading dock, where the ambulance had been only minutes before. It wasn't Bunny’s shoe. I don't know whose it was or how it got there. It was just an old tennis shoe lying on its side. I don't know why I remember that now, or why it made such an impression on me.” These, ending a chapter, reference the fact that discarded clothing can become a poignant symbol of loss (Acts of Undressing). And that last sentence is so Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye).
• And later, here is a tremendous use of pathetic fallacy in which the metaphors for death and decay come from both within the narrator and from the environment:
• “I felt my heart limping in my chest, and was revolted by it, a pitiful muscle, sick and bloody, pulsing against my ribs. Rain streamed down the windowpanes. The lawn outside was sodden, swampy. When the sun came up, I saw, in the small, cold light of dawn, that the flagstones outside were covered with earthworms: delicate, nasty, hundreds of them, twisting blind and helpless on the rain-dark sheets of slate.” (C 8)

The author repeatedly brings us insights into the human condition:

• “Isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that's no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own.” (C 1)
• “And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but ... the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master.” (C 1)
• “I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath.” (C 2)
• “I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrains. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions.” (C 4)
• “It's weird. People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind. When my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these Simon and Garfunkel records.” (C 5)
• “He was drunk; I could see it in the way he was sitting, not in an inebriated manner per se but as if a different person - a sluggish, sullen one - had occupied his body.” (C 8)
  
  

This is a brilliant book full of real psychology, a Greek tragedy for our times, with so many references.

Another book with a college background in which something terrible happens in Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman. 

August 2019; 600 pages

Other books by this brilliant author include:

• The Little Friend Loss of innocence among serpents, preachers and drugs dealers in a nightmarish vision of Mississippi small town life
• The Goldfinch A cosmic battle between Theo who brings death and destruction and his childhood friend Boris who embraces life.

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

"The Closer I get" by Paul Burston

This is a thriller about an author being stalked by an obsessive fan. I'll have to tread a bit carefully, given that the fan is described thus: “She has a blog where she writes about books. She's clearly educated and often quite insightful. But there's a lot of anger and frustration there. Some of her blogs are quite extreme.” (C 1)

Tom is a novelist whose first book was a giant hit, whose second failed to live up to expectation, and who is finding it difficult to write his third. He is monstrously self-centred: he spends all his time at a celebration dinner with his friend Emma cruising the waiter; once Emma has paid the bill he packs her off in a taxi and takes the waiter home for drunken sex after which he boots the man out of his flat. Evie is a young wannabe novelist with a horrendous history of physical abuse from her mother. 

After being stalked Tom takes Evie to court; after this he goes down to Hastings to write his book where, on the first night, he meets the waiter again, only this time dressed as a pirate. I found it hard to suspend my disbelief at this coincidence.

But is Tom safe in Hastings?

As always there is a twist at the end although I am not sure Aristotle would have approved. 

The author has a clever turn of phrase:

• “‘We're just like an old married couple,’ she was fond of saying. ‘We know each other's darkest secrets and there's no sex.’” (C 6)
• “There was no Mr Right, Tom soon discovered. There was only Mr Right Now.” (C 10)
• “I think of my mother as a hot-house flower, requiring perfect growing conditions and regular feeding. Liquid feed was her favorite, of course - especially the alcoholic variety. She demanded lots of loving care and attention. My poor father tended to her the way one might fawn over a tender fern or a rare exotic orchid. Though whenever I think of her I picture a Venus flytrap.” (C 17)
• “Dead? Yes, he is. He passed away in 2014. It doesn't stop me talking to him, though. He always said I talked too much. I'd hate to disappoint him now.” (C 22)
• “I'd rather be seen as kooky than not seen at all.” (C 26)
• “The air is thick with worry and smells of death and disease and disinfectant.” (C 28)

August 2019; 308 pages

• Another (better) book in which the protagonist is a novelist struggling to maintain the success of his first books is Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhariwal.
• Another thriller in which the protagonist is a writer is Research by Philip Kerr

My wonderful wife bought me a subscription to Books and Beer; each month I receive a crime book and some cans of beer. The other titles I have received so far are:

• Most Wanted by Robert Craik: a fast-paced thriller set in California
• The Devil's Dice by Roz Watkins: a whodunnit set in the English Peak District
• Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth: a stunning tale of crime and revenge, of temptation and sin, of evil and redemption set in 1880s Queensland and as gritty as only the Australian Outback can get.
• Snap by Belinda Bauer: a brilliant story about a young lad who, having become a burglar in order to survive, discovers his mother's killer.
• Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic: a murder mystery set in Australia in which the PI is deaf
• The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal: classic Chandleresque Mexican noir

"Barrow's Boys" by Fergus Fleming

A wonderful story of exploration of the Arctic, the Antarctic and Africa in the 1800s, expeditions commissioned by the Second Secretary of the Admiralty, John Barrow.

Apart from the hideous stories of suffering in inhospitable climates (I couldn't decide whether I would rather suffer winters in the Arctic with the ever present threat of losing bit of my body to frostbite or in Africa with the constant opportunity of dying from a parasite-borne disease; this book was only slightly less horrific in this respect than the Amazonian adventures recounted in The Lost City of Z), this book was notable for the complete bonkers people who wanted to go to these awful places, sometimes, after narrow survivals including being driven to eat one's own boots, to go back. For example, these madmen included “John Franklin ... [who] refused to sully the sabbath even by writing a letter.” (C 9), John Ross ("Never one to burn one boat when two would do") and McClure, whose "temper was uncontrollable. When ... his first officer allowed the ship to hit a hurricane, he ... was arrested and sent to his cabin with two marines standing guard outside the door.” (C 26) But not all of the madmen went abroad. The First Secretary of the Admiralty (Barrow's boss) was angry when John Ross turned down a dinner invitation on the grounds that he had just learned that his only child had died. The first secretary replied “You’ll get more children, come and dine with me.” (C 4)

Some of the story is about what happened at home. The Admiralty itself "was not interested in the unknown precisely because it was unknown.” (C 1) However, “This was the age of Romanticism, where crags of ice, tempestuous seas and tribes of undiscovered savages were far more interesting than the dry perspectives of eighteenth-century Enlightenment.” (C 1) Barrow had two particular goals: to discover the North-West Passage by which ships could sail north of Canada from the Atlantic into the Pacific, thus avoiding Cape Horn, and to discover the course of the River Niger in Africa, which he believed either emptied into Lake Chad or joined with the Nile. Part of the trouble was that he was so convinced of his own, stay-at-home, geographical theories that when explorers came home he would often tell them they were wrong and rubbish their findings or significantly edit their accounts before they were allowed to be published (normally by John Murray). A second part of the trouble was that money was always short and incompetence in good supply: “In every venture Barrow sent forth there was an element of incompetence. Something, somewhere, was always lacking.” (C 5) It is interesting to read a book in which many of the characters are so roundly condemned.

But the bulk of the narrative concerns the terrible ordeals experienced by some very brave men. Sometimes they discovered remarkable things. For example, the amazing sights Parry saw included “a fascinating phenomenon whereby the sun was surrounded by two haloes in which refraction gave birth to three mini-suns.” (C 6) and, on a later voyage to the Arctic, “a magnificent rainbow of five complete arches.” (C 14) Another explorer was able to confirm that the aurora borealis made no noise. Then there were the people:

• “Polar Eskimoes ... had split from the main group of Greenland Eskimos in about 1450, and had wandered northwards during a period known as the Little Ice Age, adapting to the cold and the available food supply to such a degree that they had lost most of the usual Arctic skills ... As far as they knew, they were the only people in the world.” (C 3)
• “The Arctic Highlanders were so isolated that they had even lost their mythology.” (C 3) 

But there were horrors as well:

• “His hands had the appearance of translucent marble and was so cold that the bowl of water into which they were plunged froze over.” (C 6)
• “The road from Murzouk to Lake Chad was 700 miles long and strewn so thickly with the remains of the some 8,500 slaves who died annually on the journey north that Oudney’s party moved with an audible crunching sound. ... For days on end they tramped through the brittle remains.” (C 11)

There were interesting experiences: 

• “He attended wild parties and slept the night off in an Eskimo hut. ‘But I was awakened by a feeling of great warmth, and to my surprise found myself covered by a large deerskin, under which lay my friend, his two wives, and their favourite puppy, all fast asleep and stark naked’.” (C 8)
• One African explorer was invited to drink water from a chamberpot which his companion recognised “as an old one of his own, which he had sold at market only a year before.” (C 13)

Other great quotes:

• “Had Ross been buried at sea he could not have been stitched up more thoroughly.” (C 4)
• “His commanding officer wrote that ‘his military exploits were worse than his poetry’ - which is saying a great deal.” (C 12)
• When the James Ross expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle the men celebrated by getting the ship’s goat drunk. “Two days later while Billy ‘was paying the usual penance for his debauchery’, they reached the ice pack.” (C 21)
• “The Falklands ... colony was pitifully neglected with only seventy inhabitants, twenty of whom were government officials.” (C 22)

A great book but I think my travel will be more enjoyable at home.

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, that are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

July 2019; 446 pages

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

"Tonight the Summer's Over" by Rory Waterman

I think I will give up reading poetry. I just don't know enough about it, and it is arrogant to endeavour to review it. I don't understand the standards against which I should compare it; I don't have the instinct born of sufficient educated connoisseurship to enable me to judge how good a poem is. I am ignorant and ignorance cannot assess.

I can understand some of the mechanics. I might be able to judge a poem as a machine. Here's an iamb, this line is a pentameter, here we have a rhyme pattern that follows the rules for a Petrarchan sonnet. But I don't know how to turn these artificial rules into understanding. It is like trying to appreciate wine by describing the shape of the bottle.

There are, I am sure, some remarkable poems in this collection. I learned a lot about the author and his troubled childhood. Some of the poems were based on standard patterns although the poet often failed to obey the rules it seemed he had imposed upon himself. Thus, for example, Family Business is a sort of sonnet: there are fourteen lines with a rhyming pattern ABBA CDDC EFFE GG; however, the scansion is not the iambic pentameters normal to sonnets (though some lines are and they are all nearly; they are pentameters but the feet vary); there isn’t a clear division between the first eight and the last six; and some of the rhymes aren’t quite.

I can understand that a single rule breakage can signal something momentous, like a half line in Virgil, but the rule breakage here seemed too frequent to be like that. I suppose it simply meant that the poet wanted the words to stand by themselves rather than to play second fiddle to an artificial structure. 

He certainly doesn't like the convention that each line of poetry should start with a capital.

There are a lot of families. In Visiting Grandpa a young girl plays with her grandfather's medals; but she isn't allowed to go to his funeral. There are a number of poems about the poet as a boy splitting his time between his divorced parents: mother in Lincolnshire and father in Northern Ireland. The narrator reacts to a baby in Seeing Baby Emrys in Gwynedd and a toddler in Stranger.

There are some great lines:

... you’re holding hands

with a wise dead owl, and learning something

inscrutable you still can’t understand.

Retrospect

... I stop
and tut and tap the wheel and find a sweet
and scrape it through its wrapper with my teeth
What Passing Bells

pallid in a damp-thick
whinny of breezing rain.
In the Avenue of Limes

Is growing older, then, forced unclenching?
An email from your mother

Arctic terns head-butt spume
Faroe Islands: notes for three photographs

A bee revs its engine
and limps from stamen
to stamen, then lifts,
chicanes to the trees.
Reverdie

... stretch-torsoed in the faraway
A suicide

... Then a two-foot scruff
with saucer eyes waddles to my knee,
fingers his nose as if uncorking it,
and asks me plainly, sweetly, who I am.
Stranger

And beyond them the nothing sun is falling through nothing
This Shipwreck Memorial a Mile from Town

July 2019

"The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver

We first meet Harrison Shepherd, born in the US of A to an American father and a Mexican mother, as a lonely boy in Mexico, learning about life from the monkeys in the trees and the fish in the sea and the cook in the kitchen. Later he becomes plaster-mixer, cook and secretary to famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, and then cook and secretary to Trotsky until Stalin's assassin catches up with Harrison's famous boss. Thus ends the first half of the book. The second half follows Harrison to Asheville, North Caroline, where he becomes a best-selling historical novelist until he runs foul of the McCarthyite government.

The first few pages prepare us for what is to come when he is misrepresented and persecuted:

• “In the beginning were the howlers. They always commenced their bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten.” (first lines)
• “The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.” (Part One, Isla Pixol, 1929)
• “The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salome could see the dirt under these girls’ fingernails, but not their wings.” (Part One, Isla Pixol, 1929)

And the lacuna? A lacuna is a gap in the record and much is made of the missing notebook that, presumably, records why Harrison was expelled from a Washington School. As his boss, painter Frida says: “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” (Part Three, San Angel and Covoacan 1935 - 1941). It is the things that others think they know about Harrison, wrongly, that get him persecuted. For Harrison a lacuna is also an underwater cave such as he has encountered in his Mexican boyhood, an opening into another world. But to the compiler of this memoir, working from his notes, Harrison himself is the lacuna, the eternal unobtrusive observer: “He wrote as if he'd been the one to carry the camera to each and everyone of his life's events, and thus was unseen in all the pictures.” (Part One, Archivist’s Note) References to lacunae are found throughout this novel:
“Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.” (Part One, Mexico City 1930)

This is a cleverly told story. It's chronological structure, the use of an archivist to introduce the various sections, the 'lost notebook', the way in which Harrison works for famous people before going to live in a famous town, the description of the real-life assassination of Trotsky, the inclusion in the later parts of letters and newspaper clippings, all add so much to the verisimilitude that I searched for Harrison Shepherd in Wikipedia. However, it also served to slow the story down. Although the first part foreshadowed the second half this was not apparent at the time. I loved the first half and raced towards the assassination of Trotsky, which I knew must be coming, and the second half (which is the point of the story) seemed tame in comparison. I found the made-up newspaper cuttings and fan letters unreal and distracting.  In the end I can appreciate the cleverness of the structure and I suppose it is important to judge any work of art by its wholeness. And it didn't seem to drag. I planned to read it in five days and I finished it in four. So Ms Kingsolver must have been doing something right.

I think I prefer the Poisonwood Bible, by the same author, though, probably because the characters are larger than life, whilst young Harrison always hides himself, especially when having sex. But my favourfite Kingsolver novel so far is Demon Copperhead.

There are some great descriptions:

• “Hunched, woolly bodies balanced on swinging limbs, their tails reaching out to stroke the branches like guitar strings.” (Part One, Isla Pixol, 1929)
• “The little cathedral looks taller than it was, and menacing, like a person who comes into the bedroom carrying a candle.” (Part One, Isla Pixol, 1929)
• “The men's high-heeled boots cut hard at the ground, drumming like penned stallions. When the music paused, they leaned across their partners in the manner of animals preparing to mate. Move away, come back, the girls waggled their shoulders.” (Part One, Isla Pixol, 1929)
• “The waitresses had white aprons and eyes wide with fright.” (Part One, Mexico City 1930)

And there is advice:

• “She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace.” (Part Three, San Angel and Covoacan 1935 - 1941)
• “Once you’re on the horse you have to hold on, I suppose. Even if he bucks.” (Part Three, San Angel and Covoacan 1935 - 1941)
• “The longer the sauce cooks, the spicier it gets.” (Part Three, San Angel and Covoacan 1935 - 1941)
• “Love ... winks on and off like an electric bulb.” (Part Three, San Angel and Covoacan 1935 - 1941)
• "A story is like a painting ... It doesn’t have to look like what you see out of the window.” (Part Three, San Angel and Covoacan 1935 - 1941)
• “An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery.” (Part Three, San Angel and Covoacan 1935 - 1941)
• “Prices rise like balloons, and we all jump like children under a pinata, reaching for our material passions.” (Part Four, Asheville, North Carolina 1941 - 7)
• “Ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” (Part Four, Asheville, North Carolina 1941 - 7)
• “She was curious about how a writer decides where to begin the story. You should start with ‘In the beginning’, I told her, but it should be as close to the end as possible. There's the trick.” (Part Four, Asheville, North Carolina 1941 - 7)
• “With Archie, irony carries the mailbag right to the door of nonchalance.” (Part Five, Asheville, North Carolina 1948 - 50)
• “In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.” (Part Five, Asheville, North Carolina 1948 - 50)
• “You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, ‘There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product!’” (Part Five, Asheville, North Carolina 1948 - 50)
• “You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap.” (Part Five, Asheville, North Carolina 1948 - 50)

July 2019; 670 pages

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize in 2010 and the 2010 Pen Faulkner Award.

Also set in Mexico: The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal

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

"Ernest Hemingway on Writing" edited by Larry W Phillips

In this short book Phillips has collected quotes from Hemingway about writing, culled from his letters, his newspaper articles and interviews and his short stories and novels. These have then been arranged into thirteen chapters. It gives an insight into Hemingway, a man always trying to "write truly". There is little practical advice to aspiring writers (such as myself) but mostly exhortations. In this world where authors are mostly told to concentrate on technical details such as plot or character it is refreshing to see that Heningway (like Lamott in Bird by Bird or Prose in Reading Like a Writer) focuses so strongly on the words.

Some great quotes (this gentleman certainly had a gift for words):

• “I am trying to make ... a picture of the whole world ... boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.” (C 1)
• “The secret is that it is poetry written into prose” (C 1)
• “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” (C 2)
• “If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the knowledge of life that he has.” (C 2)
• “You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.” (C 3)
• “When you're in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars.” (C 5)
• “You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a licence to bring in your own improvements.” (C 5)
• “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” (C 6)
• "Keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.” (C 7)
• “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” (C 7)
• “Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.” (C 8)
• “Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company ... All these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language. Nor would you gather they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice, dry, clean minds.” (C 11)
• “It has always been much more exciting to write them to be paid for it.” (C 13)
• “I only think about writing truly. Posterity can take care of herself.” (C 13)
• “Some gents when they are working on a novel may be social assets but I am just about as pleasant to be around as a bear with sore toenails.” (C 13)
• “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” (C 13)

July 2019; 140 pages

"Art Theory" by Cynthia Freeland

In this "Very Short Introduction" the author begins with a challenge by describing artworks which utilise bodily fluids and challenge the idea that beauty is necessarily pretty. Thus, the first chapter is entitled "Blood and beauty"; goriness is something shared by some very challenging modern art pieces but also by all those renaissance paintings of martyrdom. From this she extracts her first art theory: that art began as a component of a ritual (noting that the central Christian ritual of the Eucharist involves blood). However she dismisses this theory: “For participants in a ritual, clarity and agreement of purpose are central ... Most modern art .... lacks the background reinforcement of pervasive community belief that provides meaning in terms of catharsis, sacrifice, or initiation.” So she seeks alternative theories of art.

For Hume agreement on what is good art was a matter of intersubjectivity. He thought that "men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best. ... in doing so, they set a ‘standard of taste’ which is universal." However she points out that this process seems akin to "cultural indoctrination".

Kant believed that Beauty was an objective quality residing in the art object. One of the criteria was that good art has “purposiveness without a purpose”. This implies that if I am sexually aroused by Botticelli’s Venus then, for me, it is not art but pornography. Kant thought that "a beautiful object feels ‘right’. “The beautiful object appeals to our senses, but in a cool and detached way ... Art should inspire a special and disinterested response of distance and neutrality.”

“One of the most persistent of all theories of art, the imitation theory: art is an imitation of nature or of human life and action.” Thus, the Gombrich theory of “the history of Western art ... as a search for progressively more vivid renderings of reality.” The imitation theory, inevitably, led to a disagreement between Plato and Aristotle: Plato disliked imitations because they could never match up to his "eternal ideal realities”; Aristotle (in the Poetics), on the other hand, “felt that tragedy could educate by appealing to people's minds, feelings, and senses.”

Christian art theory started with Aquinas. “Aquinas theorized that Beauty was an essential or ‘transcendental’ property of God, like Goodness and Unity. Human artworks should emulate and aspire to God’s marvellous properties.” This led to the three key principles governing art in the middle ages: "proportion, light, and allegory.” The influence of proportion “dates back to Plato's Timaeus, where the creative ‘Demi- Urge’ used geometry to plan an orderly material world. The Christian God too was seen as the master builder of the Cosmos.” “Aquinas also emphasized light, using the term claritas, which denotes internal brightness and design.” hence the use in cathedrals of clerestories (clearing away the previous balconies) and therefore the need for flying buttresses.

“Nietzsche ... describe the origins of tragedy from the worship of the God Dionysus. Tragic vision showed the very essence of life as violence and suffering, with no meaning or justification. The beauty of ‘Apollonian’ poetry in Tragedy provides a veil through which we tolerate the horrific get enticing Dionysian Vision.”

Modern art critic “Danto concludes that a work of art is an object that embodies a meaning.” This means that "what artists can make as art depends upon the context of intentions possible for a given era and culture.” Freeland accepts this to some extent: “I do not mean to say we cannot begin to appreciate the power of nail fetish sculptures without further facts; but information add considerably to our experience.” “Richard Anderson (an ... ethno-aesthetician) argues that we can find something akin to art in all cultures: certain things are appreciated for their beauty, sensuous form, and skill of creation ... Anderson proposes to define art as ‘culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium’.”

Freeland goes on to ask whether Art is about the emotions or about ideas. A bit of both, she suggests. “Expression Theory holds that art communicates something in the realm of feelings and emotions.” It was espoused by Leo Tolstoy. “Freud saw art as a form of ‘sublimation’, a gratification that substitutes for the actual satisfaction of our biologically given desires (such as the desire for oral or genital pleasure).” But “Artists are often admired because then can express ideas in ways that are original, apt, and unique to a particular medium.” "Artists share thematic concerns in a given episteme with other intellectuals, including philosophers and scientists.”

In the end, she sees all this disagreement as productive. “Critics help us see more in the artist’s work and understand it better. Interpretations are superior if they explain more aspects of the artist’s work.” “Experts notice many things that regular movie audiences might not, such as the intricate shot structure of the infamous shower scene in Psycho.”

An excellent brief introduction into 'What is Art?'

More great and thought-provoking quotes:

• “Blood ... has interesting similarities to paint. Fresh blood has an eye-catching hue with a glossy sheen. It will stick to a surface.” (C 1)
• “Blood is our human essence - Dracula sucks it up as he creates the undead. Blood can by holy or noble, the sacrificial blood of martyrs or soldiers. Spots of blood on sheets indicate the loss of virginity and passage to adulthood.” (C 1)
• “The cynical assessment is that blood in contemporary art does not forge meaningful associations, but promotes entertainment and profit. The art world is a competitive place, and artists need any edge they can get.” (C 1)
• “Wagner’s ...use of leitmotifs - phrases associated with particular themes or characters, as well as used for dramatic effect - recurs, for example, in John Williams's music for the Star Wars movies.” (C 2)
• “Cultures often come into contact through means that limit communication, such as imitation, shopping, and mass-market sales.” (C 3)
• “Despite gaps between cultures, intercultural contact is age-old. The art of ancient Greece was influenced by Egyptian sphinxes, Scythian goldsmithing, Syrian love goddesses, and Phoenician coin design.” (C 3)
• When the leader of an aboriginal dance troupe stepped forward at the end of a performance to tell the audience that there were CDs for sale, the author was shocked “as though he but not I had to remain trapped in the amber of the past.” (C 3)
• “Dictators and other political powers often suppress art because it provides a point of critical resistance.” (C 3)
• “Art and money interact in many institutions - in, particular museums. Museums preserve, collect, and educate the public and convey standards about art’s value and quality - but whose standards, and how?” (C 4)
• “As John Dewey commented in 1934, ‘Generally speaking, the typical collector is the typical capitalist.’ ... J Paul Getty’s ... tales of collecting are in each case accounts of how much he spent.” (C 4)
• "Dewey said that understanding art is like understanding another person. You may know how to interpret your beloved's smile, but can you summarize it in a sentence?” (C 6)
• “The elaborate three-minute videos broadcast worldwide on MTV specialize in rapid cuts and montage.” (C 7)

July 2019; 140 pages