"Hangover Square" by Patrick Hamilton

Hangover Square is written by the man who also wrote the play Gaslight, itself responsible for the term 'gaslighting'. J B Priestley described the author as "an unhappy man who needed whisky as a car needs petrol". 

The protagonist of Hangover Square, George Bone, suffers from some sort of Jekyll and Hyde personality (the author introduces the book with the dictionary definition of schizophrenia). Normally George is a rather ineffectual drunkard, hopelessly in love with an actress called Netta who uses his infatuation to humiliate him, to 'borrow' money from him, and to use his connections to try and get close to an important theatrical agent. But George will sometimes (without warning or any obvious trigger) 'click' into a sort of fugue state in which he hates Netta and schemes to murder her.

The story is set in the months leading up to the start of the Second World War, principally in pubs and rented rooms in Earls Court, with a couple of forays into Brighton. Most of the characters are drunks with no visible means of support; one is an ex-fascist who has spent time in prison for killing someone with his motorcar while drunk-driving. The protagonist lives in a 'hotel' (more of a rooming house) on the rapidly-diminishing proceeds of a win on the football pools. There is an atmosphere of genteel poverty and general seediness, a sort of middle-class version of the life depicted in the early chapters of The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell.

The bulk of the narration is from the point of view of George, although there are chapters in which the story is told from the perspective of other characters, including an anonymous 'young man'. George's narration is virtually 'stream of consciousness' and reminded me (especially given how much he vacillates) of Hunger by Knut Hamsun. It is particularly interesting for its description of the fugue state in which the murderous personality exists, and the for transition between the two. He uses a small number of descriptions of this, and recycles them. For example:

• "It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead." (1.1)
• "In the line of telephone booths there were a few other people locked and lit up in glass, like waved fruit, or Crown jewels ... and he went in and became like them - a different sort of person in a different sort of world - a muffled, urgent, anxious, private, ghostly world, composed not of human beings but of voices, disembodied communications." (2.3)
• "It was as though he had gone suddenly deaf - mentally deaf. It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard, and the outer world had become dim and dead. It was as though one had gone into a sound-proof telephone booth and shut the door tightly on oneself." (3.6)
• "It was as though his head were a five-shilling Kodak camera, and somebody had switched over the little trigger that makes the exposure. ... But instead of an exposure having been made the opposite had happened - an inclosure - a shutting down, a locking in. A moment before his head, his brain, were out in the world seeing, hearing, sensing objects directly; now they were enclosed behind glass(like Crown jewels, like Victorian wax fruit), behind a film ... a film behind which all things and people moved eerily, without colour, vivacity or meaning, grimly, puppet-like, without motive or conscious volition of their own." (7.1)
• "It was as though he had dived into a swimming-bath and hit his head on the bottom, and was floating about, bewildered and inaudible to himself, in hushed green depths." (Last.1)

Selected quotes

• "Netta. The tangled net of her hair - the dark net - the brunette. The net in which he was caught - netted. Nettles. The wicked poison-nettles from which had been brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles. She stung and wounded him with words from her red mouth. Nets. Fishing-nets. Mermaid's nets. Bewitchment. Syrens - the unearthly beauty of the sea. Nets. Nest. To nestle. To nestle against her. Test. Breast. In her net. Netta." (1.4)
• "He smiled again, and looked at Peter so that he didn't have to look at her - in very much the same way as a shy person, having been introduced to a stranger by a friend, looks hard at his friend while the three of them talk, makes his friend's eyes his anchor." (1.6)
• "It was as though she were a small amateur wireless station, and he alone was tuned in to her and listening." (2.1)
• "He scanned the headlines gloomily. 'TRAINS CRASH IN SNOW STORM: 85 DEAD, 300 INJURED'. He experienced a momentary feeling that he was about to be shocked, and then he saw that the news came from Budapest, which meant that he did not have to be shocked." (2.3)
• "This girl wore her attractiveness not as a girl should, simply, consciously, as a happy crown of pleasure, but rather as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately right and left" (4.2)
• "She had at one time hoped to make good at films ... but she was unable to relate this ambition with the labour requisite for its maturing. She expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty." (5.3)
• "Oh - how the summer had crashed, and he with it!" (7.3)
• "What fate was it which made him always walking, always by himself?" (7.3)
• "He entered the dense bottle-neck of human beings by the ticket-collector. ... He couldn't understand what all these people, none of them about to kill anybody, were up to ... They had no reality: nothing had any reality. There was only his plan ... His plan was all he had to stick to, in a confused, meaningless, planless world." (7.5)
• "The police could meddle, could get him, even in Maidenhead, if he arrived there before dark. He knew the rules all right." (7.7)

An intriguing exploration of a mentally ill man lost in a hostile world.

April 2023; 281 pages

This review was written by the author of

Bally and Bro, Motherdarling and The Kids of God

"Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens

Placed 4th in the BBC's best novels of all time, this is one of the most popular of the novels of Charles Dickens, Great Expectations is a bildungsroman narrated in the first person, in the past tense, warning of the dangers of trying to turn a working-class boy into a gentleman. (In Oliver Twist, the hero can be successfully transformed because, despite his upbringing in a workhouse, he is of good birth and nature trumps nurture. For all his early support of social reform, Dickens, himself a middle-class boy who had been plunged into the lower classes by the improvidence of his parents before escaping through his writing, was a great believer that the social hierarchy of Victorian Britain was god-ordained.)

A with most novels by Dickens, it's plot is heavily convoluted. It was originally published in serial form so a cliff-hanger is needed every few chapters. The hook at the start of the book occurs at the bottom of the first page.

Again, as is typical with Dickens, it contains extravagantly grotesque but utterly memorable characters. Dickens develops his characters through their appearances, often succinctly but vividly described (eg "an old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture"; Ch 23), their behavioural characteristics (eg the way Mrs G cuts bread in chapter 2) and the peculiarities of their speech (Joe Gargery being the prime example in this novel). Some of the cast are little more than comic decorations (eg Trabb's boy, Pumblechook and Mr Wopsle, and the Aged P). But even his major characters rarely develop. Joe is salt-of-the-earth throughout. It takes brain damage to make Mrs Gargery nice. Jaggers is Jaggers, Wemmick is Wemmick, Estelle is Estelle. They are little more than scenery with which the hero can interact, against whom he can fulfil his potentialities. Only the half-mad Miss Havisham, to a very limited extent, and Pip, who is growing up, change. This is what limits Great Expectations. It is hugely entertaining but it is entertainment rather than art.

It is like a painting that impresses one by the skill shown in creating a two-dimensional scene with three-dimensional verisimilitude. Dickens achieves this with his detailed descriptions of settings. He clearly knew these places intimately and he can recreate them in the mind of the readers. Many of these settings are classic Gothic melodrama settings: the deserted churchyard on the misty marshes, the tumbledown crowded buildings in London, the desolate dereliction of Miss Havisham's house. But, as with his characters, they are utterly memorable.

The start of the plot:

Pip, an orphan living with his sister and her blacksmith husband on the marshes of the Thames estuary in Kent, encounters an escaped convict, Magwitch, and is terrified into helping him. Later, he is sent as a playmate for the girl being brought up by Miss Havisham, a rich recluse who retired from the world when she was jilted on her wedding day. Years later, when Pip is an apprentice blacksmith, he is told by a London lawyer that he has great expectations of inheriting a substantial fortune but the identity of the donor is to be kept hidden. Pip, believing the donor to be Miss Havisham, goes to London to be educated as a gentleman, and starts to look down on his former family and friends.

Of course, being Dickens, there are multiple sub-plots, all of which, however fancifully, are resolved in the end. Had I written the book I would have excised at least the Orlick plot; it isn't necessary, it over-complicates the plot, it blurs the focus. 

Fundamentally, though, the novel, though long, is easy to read, is packed full of incident, has a wonderful cast, and, as entertainment, is superb. 

Selected quotes:

• "Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion." (Ch 4)
• "In his working-clothes, Joe was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and everything that he wore then grazed him." (Ch 4)
• "A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air,—like our own marsh mist." (Ch 11)
• "I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still." (Ch 17)
• "Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make off somewhere" (Ch 18)
• "I went to the hatter’s, and the bootmaker’s, and the hosier’s, and felt rather like Mother Hubbard’s dog whose outfit required the services of so many trades" (Ch 19) The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog was written by Sarah Catherine Martin and published in 1805; it is an extended poem which relates the adventures of a lady whose original is said to have lived in a thatched cottage in Yealmpton, Devon which can still be seen. It was a great success and the first verse (which is supposed to be of ancient origin) is still known as a nursery rhyme today: Old Mother Hubbard/ Went to the cupboard/To give the poor Dog a bone;/When she came there,/The Cupboard was bare,/And so the poor Dog had none." The rest of the book describes the various different tradespeople to whom Mother Hubbard goes to ensure that the dog is properly cared for.
• "I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off." (Ch 21)
• "no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; ... the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself." (Ch 22)
• "'me and Wopsle went off straight to look at the Blacking Ware’us. But we didn’t find that it come up to its likeness in the red bills at the shop doors; which I meantersay, added Joe, in an explanatory manner, as it is there drawd too architectooralooral'.” (Ch 27) When his family fell on hard times, the young Charles Dickens worked at Warren's Blacking (at 30, Hungerford Stairs, just off the Strand; the factory was demolished and the site is now Incorporated within Charing Cross Station) which made boot polish. Dickens was always ashamed of his time here.
• "All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make as good money!" (Ch 28)
• “it seems to me that in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking into our gift-horse’s mouth with a magnifying-glass." (Ch 30)
• “'—Invest portable property in a friend?' said Wemmick. 'Certainly he should not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend,—and then it becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to get rid of him'.” (Ch 36)
• "looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think it might perplex the thread of his narrative." (Ch 41)
• "The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death." (Ch 53)

April 2023; 460 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

I have been watching the BBC TV 2023 six-part adaptation. Here are some of my thoughts.

• How old is Pip?
• He seems to be a young boy at the start of the novel; most commentators suggest he is seven or eight. But the BBC adaptation shows a rather older boy, eleven or older, with the attitude of a surly teenager. So I tried to enquire more deeply into Pip's chronology. According to the text, he goes to Miss Havisham's a year after the convict incident. He still seems a little boy: the only card game he can play is Beggar My Neighbour. But ten months after this, he is apprenticed to Joe. But in those days, apprenticeships normally started at about age fourteen, and one would have thought that a lad younger than that wouldn't have the physical strength needed for blacksmithery. He stays apprentice for four years before his Expectations take him to London where he is for an undetermined period (three years or so?) before her comes of age at 21. This suggests that there are some missing years, and that they should be within the Miss Havisham experience. 
• If we take the BBC line, that he is say twelve at the start of the book (and not nearly so naive as the text implies) then his Expectations come six years later. But this won't work. Magwitch in Australia has to do seven years forced labour before being able to start out on his own. and making a fortune (and that presumably takes a few years). Even if he comes into his Expectations at the age of 20 (it must be before 21) we don't have enough time. The only way we can reconcile the Magwitch back story with the Pip story is if he encounters the convict on the marshes when he is at most ten years old. 

"Meet the Georgians" by Robert Peal

 A popular history written by a secondary school headteacher and history teacher with a style that seems targeted at teenagers. To give you a flavour, it describes Lady Hamilton as "the original influencer" and Nelson as "the bravest, most ass-kicking admiral in the entire Royal Navy." It talks about how "to look totally epic dressing like it's 1725."

The bulk of the book consists of twelve mini biographies. 

• Anne Bonny and Mary Read
• Bonnie Prince Charlie
• John Wilkes
• Tipu Sultan
• Olaudah Equiano
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• The Ladies of Llangollen
• Lady Hamilton
• Hester Stanhope
• Lord Byron
• Mary Anning
• James Watt

It's an interesting selection, with a careful gender balance, the inclusion of two people of colour, and from the LGBT+ community, although to suggest that Lady Hamilton was the only Georgian who defied the Georgian social hierarchy is naive; Captain James Cook is an obvious counter-example. Most of all, it avoided the obvious people who have been extensively covered. I definitely want to learn more about Hester Stanhope.

It is deliberately populist and a very easy read but inevitably this approach means ignoring some of the nuances and subtleties of a fascinating age. There is a tendency to make over-simplified sweeping statements, such as suggesting that "gothic literature was born that stormy night in Geneva in 1816" with Polidori's The Vampyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, ignoring what most see as the start of the genre: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), The Monk by Matthew Lewis (1796) and the considerable contributions of Mrs Radcliffe, eg A Sicilian Romance (1790). He also overlooks some of the very real disagreements between historians (though it does acknowledge that Olaudah Equiano may have been fictionalising his autobiography when he claimed to have been abducted from Africa, rather than being born a slave).

But this book is a great introduction to an often ignored age.

Selected quotes:

• "Some imagine that the Britain of the past was always a place of polite manners, Sunday church and stiff upper lips. However, this national character was a creation of the Victorian period." (Introduction)
• "Something had changed in British politics during Wilkes's Middlesex election campaign. The common people realised that government should be based on their support, and not their obedience." (John Wilkes)

March 2023; 260 pages

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

"Lanark" by Alasdair Gray

Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of his best novels since 1939. 

 This novel combines a sociological novel exploring the death of a society with an autobiography of the artist. It incorporates aspects of metafiction, for example, in the sequence of the parts (Book 3, Prologue, Book 1, Book 2, Book 4) and in the Epilogue (placed within Book 4) which incorporates the author discussing the plot with the protagonist, footnotes and an 'Index of Plagiarisms' directing the readers attention to the literary sources of the novel. 

I enjoyed books one and two which followed a lad called Thaw through childhood, school and art college to his first commission, a period in which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempts to lose his virginity, and at the end of which he suffers a breakdown. 

The frame narrative (books three, which comes before one, and four, which follows two) follows the picaresque adventures of a lad called Lanark, who is presumably Thaw, post breakdown. The narrative starts in a city we later learn is called Unthank into which Lanark has strayed having forgotten his name (this was very like the beginning of Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney). Soon Lanark is swallowed (Book of Jonah?) and falls into an underground world (Alice in Wonderland?) which is run by the sinister Institute. Later he leaves the Institute to travel through an intercalendrical zone back to Lanark where he endeavours to prevent the destruction planned for the city. So, a dystopia, with hints of The Time Machine by H G Wells mixed with You Only Live Twice? In this experimental fiction phase of the book, the author's ever-fertile imagination spawns lots of incidents and loads of characters and somehow fails to present a narrative that gels. Whilst I had been invested in the trials and tribulations of wannabe-artist Thaw, I never really cared what happened to Lanark or his world.

In the end, whilst appreciating the author's erudition (all those sources!) and his skill, I was disappointed. 

But there is humour ("Do you abuse yourself? Certainly, if I've been stupid in public."; Ch 18) and there are wonderful descriptions ("The yellow or purple spots of occasional roadside flowers shrieked like tiny discords in an orchestra where every instrument played over and over again the same two notes."; Ch 18) and the text is saturated with ideas.

Sources

The Index of Plagiarisms in the Epilogue gives an alphabetical list of sources for this novel. They include:

• William Blake
• John Bunyan since Lanark's progress in parts three and four could be regarded as a rather Rabelaisian version of Pilgrim's Progress
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Lewis Carroll
• Joyce Cary's The Horses Mouth (particularly its hero Gulley Johnson who is a "Blake-quoting penniless painter of a mural illustrating the biblical Genesis in a derelict church")
• William Golding (whose protagonist of the book Pincher Martin is either dying or dead)
• James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka: the Index cites the last chapter of The Trial but parts three and four are very Kafkaesque
• Charles Kingsley: The Water Babies, much of which involves a journey through a sort of purgatory after the hero has drowned himself
• H G Wells: specifically the sublunar civilization in The First Men on the Moon

But I was reminded of other novels too, particularly Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney and the work of William Burroughs.

Selected quotes:

• "the film ... was about people who undressed soon after the beginning and then did everything they could think of in the circumstances." (Ch 1)
• "He knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn't do very much." (Ch 2)
• "If a writer doesn't enjoy words for their own sake how can the reader enjoy them?" (Ch 4)
• "Metaphor is one of thought's most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing." (Ch 4)
• "genital eagerness sucked thought out of him." (Ch 5)
• "why should we even try to be human if we are going to die? If you die your pain and struggle have been useless!" (Ch 7)
• "A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying." (Ch 7)
• "Names are nothing but collars men tie round your neck to drag you where they like." (Ch 9)
• "In modern civilizations those who work in the sunlight are a despised and dwindling minority. ... As for lovemaking and friendship, humanity has always preferred to enjoy these at night." (Ch 9)
• "Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself and the recipe is separation." (Ch 11)
• "She expected splendour. Most of us expect it sometime or other, and growing old is mainly a way of learning to do without." (Prologue)
• "He kept these pictures between pages of Carlyle's French Revolution, a book no one else was likely to open." (Ch 16)
• "A nearly naked blonde smiling as if her body was a joke she wanted to share." (Ch 18)
• "Various plants struggled in the poor soil, fighting with blind deliberation to suffocate or strangle each other." (Ch 18)
• "Hard-backed leggy things with multiple eyes and feelers, all gnawing holes and laying eggs and squirting poisons in the plants and each other." (Ch 18)
• "We are all hate, big balloons of hate." (Ch 18)
• "Men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the recipe is hate." (Ch 18)
• "The skin disease returned and his throat looked as if he had made an incompetent effort to cut it." (Ch 19)
• "People ... think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon." (Ch 20)
• "Everyone carried on their necks a grotesque art object, originally inherited, which they never tired of altering and adding to." (Ch 21)
• "Folk near the river were usually gaunter, half a head shorter and had cheaper clothes than folk in the suburbs." (Ch 22)
• "My mother told her she wasn't fit to sleep with a pig. Which forced me into the unenviable position of declaring she was fit to sleep with a pig." (Ch 23)
• "He was struck by the clarity of the stars. They were not like lights stippling the inside surface of a dome but like galactic chandeliers hung at different levels in the black air." (Ch 23)
• "Great beetles emerged. The city was full of them. They were five feet long and shaped like rowing boats with antennae and had mouths in their stomachs." (Ch 23)
• "Of course she's frigid. So am I. But nobody stays the same forever and even lumps of ice, surely, will melt if they rub together long enough." (Ch 24)
• "All night he was dipping in and out of sleep, but at such a shallow angle he never noticed." (Ch 26)
• "The mountain has laboured and given birth to a small obnoxious rodent." (Ch 36) This is an adaptation of a Latin epigram from Roman poet Horace.
• "Prosperity is made by the bosses struggling with one another for more wealth. If they have to struggle with their workers too, then everybody loses." (Ch 38)
• "Touch tells me you are near me but eyes talk about the space between." (Ch 41)
• "Grampa says there isn't a God. People invented him. They invented motorcars too." (Ch 41)
• "He had lost someone or something, a secret document, a parent, or his self-respect." (Ch 41)

March 2023; 561 pages

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

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison

It is shortly after the end of the American Civil War and the ending of slavery in the USA. House number 124, isolated on the outskirts of Cincinnati, is  haunted by the ghost of a baby girl, Beloved. It has already driven away her elder brothers, and her grandmother has died; now only her mother, Sethe, an ex-slave and her younger sister, Denver, live there. Then Paul D, who had known Sethe when they were slaves together, arrives. He banishes the ghost and starts a relationship with Sethe. Then a girl calling herself Beloved arrives ...

The book deals with the horrors of slavery. Even though the characters are now free, the psychological  scars remain. Their experiences have shaped them; their experiences have made them the people who they are. The novel is a powerful condemnation of the slave-owners; even the white people who secretly worked to help slaves escape, and who helped them once they had, and still help them, are judged.

As is fitting with a book about haunting, the narrative flits backwards and forwards. It is written in the third-person past tense and sometimes, for example at the start, from an omniscient perspective, although it usually sees things through the eyes of one of the characters, usually a principal character. 

It is a well-written book and an interesting exploration of the principal characters. The back and forwards narrative leading to the slow discovery of what happened in the past means that there is a significant amount that the reader has to puzzle out at the start of the novel. I found this mystery challenging; it motivated me to keep reading.

This book won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Time magazine chose it as one of their 100 best books since Time began. Toni Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. A list of other winners can be found here.

Selected quotes (page numbers refer to the 2007 Vintage paperback edition):

• "Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it." (p 4)
• "It made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world." (p 7)
• "Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes, he looked the way he had in Kentucky." (p 8)
• "That was the year winter came in a hurry at suppertime and stayed eight months." (p 34)
• "They had pretty manners, all of 'em. Talked soft and spit in handkerchiefs. Gentle in a lot of ways. You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face." (p 44) They go on to commit rape.
• "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay." (p 51)
• "Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall.Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out." (p 55)
• "The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent." (p 57)
• "Women who drink champagne when there is nothing to celebrate can look like that: their straw hats with broken brims are often askew; they nod in public places; their shoes are undone." (p 60)
• "Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life." (p 68)
• "'Today is always here', said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never'." (p 72)
• "Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn axe. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside." (p 81)
• "Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from." (p 86)
• "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another." (p 112)
• "Loaves and fishes were His powers - they did not extend to an ex-slave." (p 161)
• "The woman junkheaped for the third time because she loved her children." (p 205)
• "Each seemed to be helping the other two stay upright. ... Making their way over hard snow, they stumbled and had to hold on tight, but nobody saw them fall." (p 205, p206)
• "She couldn't read clock time very well, but she knew when the hands were closed in prayer at the top of the face she was through for the day." (p 223)
• "She is the laugh; I am the laughter." (p 255)
• "She was a practical woman who believed there was a root either to chew or avoid for every ailment. Cogitation, as she called it, clouded things and prevented action. Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they did, for she considered love a serious disability." (p 301)
• "She turned to him, her face looking like someone had turned up the gas jet." (p 315)
• "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order." (p 321)
• "Sethe ... me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow." (p 322)

March 2023; 324 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began.

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

"The Group" by Khurram Elahi

Jag, a rather naive IT consultant loses his life savings through an online scam. He then gets involved with an online support group in an attempt to get his money back. His relations with his wife and young daughter spiral downwards. As he becomes increasingly depressed, he gets a strange message from his scammer, his laptop is hacked and a colleague of Jag's gives his daughter an artificially intelligent robot cat. Jag's only solace is growing potatoes in raised beds in his garden. 

Told in the third person past tense almost entirely from Jag's point of view, this is a blow-by-blow account of normal family life descending into darkness. The author's style is very matter-of-fact reportage interspersed with almost melodramatic descriptions of the hurricanes of emotion experienced by Jag. I loved the fact that the protagonist was such a normal person, living in such an ordinary world. That's what makes this book a classic and powerful example of noir fiction featuring a victim protagonist and chronicling how a crime can disrupt everyday life. 

It certainly kept me turning the pages and repeatedly overturned my expectations of what would happen next.

Selected quotes:

• "The seconds of his hand were ticking, marking a weary indulgence into a grey unpredictable world, fearful of falling into that trap again. This time it had been an expensive mistake and a formidable trap. He now had to somehow squeak his way out and find salvation." (Ch 1)
• "When something is too good to be true it probably is. It ended up being too bad to believe." (Ch 4)
• "Everyone knows you can lose but no one believes it." (Ch 4)
• "his balance was swelling like a city bankers’ stomach." (Ch 5)
• "Then Jag read with a concentration suspended in mid-air, finding himself engrossed in the catalogue of catastrophes that littered the pages of the website. It was like opening the door to his first alcoholics anonymous session, but without any relief. From a human side, it felt like each post was a victim’s vomit spewed painfully out onto the page. His stomach turned. He tried to understand user after user, wrenching out his own heart, placing it on display in a show of open embarrassment, plain for all to see. It was an exhibition without the artistry, a museum without masterpieces. Only naked, humiliated tears of blood in a sordid and candid display of devastation." (Ch 13)
• "Despite knowing that once opened there could be no hiding it, she tried to open it as carefully as possible." (Ch 14)
• "the clock battery could wait. But wait for what, the end of time?" (Ch 18)
• "Today it was sunny, but the shine had all been used up." (Ch 26)
• "He was the muscular equivalent of a stutterer." (Ch 27)
• "Fat blotches of water spitting onto surfaces" (Ch 36)
• "He had to take some action rather than sitting there like a puppet in a show, awaiting strings to help him move." (Ch 44)
• "Living in the same house yet worlds apart." (Ch 48)
• "He was simply living word to word now" (Ch 51)

Khurram Elahi's debut novel, A Change of Seasons, is also reviewed in this blog.

March 2023

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

"The Heat of the Day" by Elizabeth Bowen

This book was rated 69th by Robert McCrum on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. It was selected by Anthony Burgess as one of the best 99 novels since 1939.

I think I was misled by the publisher’s blurb which characterised this book as a spy novel set in World War II. This led me to expect something like a Graham Greene novel, perhaps a hybrid between The End of the Affair and The Ministry of Fear, perhaps with a touch of John Le Carre, although his books are set later. This isn’t a spy novel in those terms. Yes, it plays with themes of patriotism and betrayal. Yes, it uses the trope of ambiguity. But at the heart, this is a Kafkaesque investigation into the nature and limitations of narrative truth. Therefore, the reader must not expect the narrative clarity of the thriller.

Even the core of the plot is left for the reader to infer. Harrison, a mysterious figure who claims to be working for counter-intelligence, tells Stella, the main protagonist, that her boyfriend Robert is spying for the enemy. Stella seems to assume that, if she agrees to sleep with him “to form a disagreeable association” (Ch 2) in her words, Harrison will not inform on Robert. She spends most of the novel deciding what to do and whether she should tell Robert.

The novel is set in wartime London, a time and place of liminality. “War at present worked as a thinning of the membrane between the this and the that.” (Ch 10) The blitz as such is over, the second blitz (of the V1 and V2 rockets) has not yet begun. The present is seen as the no-man’s land between the past and the future: “vacuum as to future was offset by vacuum as to past.” (Ch 5) Although time seems to be set and fixed - the novel starts precisely on “the first Sunday of September 1942” (Ch 1); other key events of the novel are tied to specific events during the war - and despite the plethora of clocks, time is actually fluid. For example, it seems to move more slowly when we leave London. In Robert’s family home "the grandfather clock ... must have stood there always - time had clogged its ticking." (Ch 5). In Cousin Nettie’s care home the owner “Mrs Tringsby ... does not know what time it is unless she looks at the clock” (Ch 11). Meanwhile, at the Irish estate of Cousin Francis, “by travelling west you enter longer days; this hour ... seemed to be outside time - an eternal luminousness of dusk in which nothing but the fire’s flutter and the clock’s ticking out there in the hall were to be heard ... she could have imagined this was another time, rather than another country, that she had come to.” (Ch 9) Characters regularly look at clocks (when we first meet Stella she is hearing her clock strike eight, chapter 14 ends with Robert looking at a clock etc) but even they are unreliable: Louie’s alarm clock fails to go off in the morning (Ch 13), and when Stella first meets Robert their wristwatches do not show the same time which comes to symbolise their relationship “by never perfectly synchronizing” (Ch 5).

Although place seems, like time, to have a strong connection to reality, in fact the places mentioned are, as they can be in wartime when the ebb and flow of armies redraws the map, fluid. Thus, Stella lives in more than one flat. Similarly, Robert’s family has lived in a number of homes, and the one they are in at present was put up for sale almost as soon as they moved in. Harrison says he lives in three places. Cousin Francis leaves his estate in Ireland and comes to England where he dies and is buried; when Robert visits the graveyard he cannot locate the grave (the stone is not up yet). In particular, London is seen as a place which is in flux (because of the bombing) and contrasted with the estate in Ireland which represents permanence and continuity between the past and the future.

This liminal fluidity and instability applies to the characters. “It was a characteristic of life in that moment and for the moment’s sake that one knew people well without knowing much about them.” (Ch 5) Robert and Harrison are spies who, by their nature, are not what they seem; both characters also have physical asymmetries, Robert with his limp (and even that “inequality” changes: “at times he could control it out of existence, at others he fairly pitched along with an impatient exaggeration of lameness”; Ch 5) and Harrison with his eyes, one of which appears to be higher than the other. Cousin Nettie is feigning madness. Louie, orphaned by a bomb and her husband fighting abroad, lurches from lover to lover. Few of the characters have complete histories. We know next to nothing about Harrison and not a lot more about Stella and they are antagonist and protagonist! Stella herself describes her relationship with Robert in terms of impermanence: “we are friends of circumstance - war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing’s said.” (Ch 10)

Much of the dialogue is ambiguous. No-one ever says anything definite. A major driver of the plot is Harrison suggesting to Stella that, if she sleeps with him, he won’t arrest Robert but he never actually puts it in those terms. The nearest we come to it is Stella saying “I’m to form a disagreeable association in order that a man be left free to go on selling his country” (Ch 2). And when she says “A friend is out of danger” this seems to be as close as she gets to agreeing to Harrison’s proposition. Perhaps the most straightforward speakers are Cousin Nettie (who is mad) and Donovan, both of whom give answers to Roderick’s questions as though they were oracles, despite being outsiders.

And the ultimate outsider is, of course, the ever-elusive Harrison, who is puppet-master, controlling how the others behave, as if he were the author herself, or a god, the creator of the drama, omniscient (he can tell from Robert’s behaviour not only that Stella has told him he is suspected but also when she told him) but himself utterly unknowable. Robert asks Stella “is he anybody?” (Ch 10) Louie looks for Harrison in the park but “as she feared was probably, failed to see him.” (Ch 8) Or perhaps he isn’t God but the Devil, sent to tempt Stella only to reject her when she at last agrees to be tempted.

This book seems to be about the nature of truth, in particular narrative truth. Louie reads the newspapers and seems to construct her identity, or measure it, by reference to what the newspapers tell her. There are ironic references to the manipulation of the facts presented in the newspapers: “Once you looked in the papers you saw where it said, nothing was so bad as it might look. What a mistake, to have gone by the look of things! The papers knew Britain had something up her sleeve - Britain could always, in default of anything else, face facts.” (Ch 8) Meanwhile, in Germany, “I was told how they swallow anything they are told ... they do have papers, but not like our ones with ideas. It said how to get them through the war they have to kid them along, but how the war makes us think.” (Ch 8) And there are repeated references throughout the book to the telling of stories: “One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable; perpetually one was subject to the sense of there having to be a beginning somewhere.” (Ch 7); “Where, at the start, the story came from I don’t know. ... Whoever’s the story had been, I let it be mine. ... It came to be my story, and I stuck to it ... then it went on sticking to me: it took my shape and equally I took its.” (Ch 12); “What story is true? Such a pity, I sometimes think, that there should have to be any stories. We might have been happy the way we were.” (Ch 11)

Truth, then, depends on how we see it. One of the other motifs of the book is reflection; we can see ourselves (and others) by means of a mirror and also by means of a photograph. In chapter 2, Harrison, in Stella’s flat, searching for an ashtray, comes “face to face with the mirror and photographs”, one of which is of Stella’s son Roderick and the other of Robert. When Roderick goes there, seeing the reflections of the lights in the glass of pictures, he reflects “This did not look like a home, but it looked like something - possibly a story.” (Ch 3) When Stella goes to the funeral in chapter 4 she sees Roderick’s father’s people reflected in a “tarnished mirror”. When she sees Robert’s room in his family home there are “sixty or seventy photographs ... hung in close formations on two walls. All the photographs featured Robert ... he was depicted at every age.” Robert describes these as a “pack of his own lies”. (Ch 6) Louie writes to her absent husband Tom that she looks at his photograph daily which is “one more misrepresentation of love’s unamenable truth” since she only picks it up and dusts around it. (Ch 8) At the ancestral home in Ireland “By anyone standing down by the river looking up, sky was to be seen reflected in row upon row of vast glass panes ... reflections up from the river prolonged daylight.” Stella looks “from mirror to mirror, into misted extensions of the [drawing] room.” (Ch 9). Meanwhile Cousin Nettie doesn’t have a photo of her family home: “why should I want a picture of anything I have seen?” (Ch 11)

It’s rather heavy-going. I have previously quoted from chapter ten in which Stella says “war, this isolation, this atmosphere in which everything goes on and nothing’s said.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Even when facing an existential crisis, Bowen’s characters can’t resist discussing everything, in long-winded, often ambiguous sentences whose syntax is sometimes twisted almost beyond recognition. I didn’t really get into the book until I’d read half. Part of the problem is that it isn’t realistic and there aren’t sharply defined characters (despite all those mirrors I have little idea what any of the major characters actually looked like). There is, I think, a huge amount of symbolism to find and I think my discussion above has only touched the surface of what is a multiply-layered, deep and complex novel. Fascinating ... but hard work.

Does Stella visit Hell? Spoiler alert!

One of the key scenes comes in chapter 12. In chapter 10, Stella has told Robert that Harrison thinks he is a spy; Robert has denied it, angrily accused Stella of not trusting him, and then proposed marriage to her. In chapter 11 Roderick visits the slightly barmy Cousin Nettie. Chapter 12 then returns us to Stella who is with Harrison. He takes her to an underground “bar or grill which had no air of having existed before tonight.” Those eating at the counter, seen from the back, are described in detail; a member of my U3A described this as like an Otto Dix painting of decadent cafe life during the Weimar Republic. “Not a person did not betray, by one or another glaring peculiarity, the fact of being human” except, presumably, the dog with the studded collar and the unreadable brass nameplate. These people talk incessantly but inaudibly. The room has “more the look than fact of overpowering heat”. Stella describes it as a “lie-detecting place”. They eat a lobster salad. They discuss the fact that Roderick has just discovered that his parents divorced because of his father’s infidelity, rather than his mother’s as she has always told him; she has been lying to him all these years. Harrison then tells Stella that she has been “naughty”, she has been less than frank with him, because she has tipped Robert off that Harrison knows he’s a spy. “What do you think I’m for?” asks Harrison. She looks at the diners again and wonders who they are; he says they are the “usual crowd”. But Stella notices that one of them (Louie) recognises Harrison; he tries to avoid looking at Louie. Harrison says that, thanks to Stella, there is no more reason to leave Robert “loose”, things will have to “take their course”. The dog is now bothering them and Harrison tries to kick it away. Stella realises she will have to make a decision about whether to “buy out Robert” (presumably by having sex with Harrison). But now Louie approaches the table, claiming (with transparent dishonesty) that the dog belongs to her, or her friend. Harrison tells Louie “you’d better beat it home. You’ll only be landing yourself in more trouble.” Louie reveals that she met Harrison in the park and pushes the dog away “as though it would be safest as far away as possible”. She says she is surprised that Stella is with Harrison who she describes as “wicked”. Stella hints that she will surrender herself to Harrison at which point he tells them both to go away together. Stella asks what he intends to do and he says, “Pay the bill. Do you think a bill pays itself?”

I think that in best ‘Hero’s Journey’ manner, this is intended to be the visit to hell. It is underground and hot. There is a hell hound, though it only has a single head and doesn’t guard the entrance. The inhabitants are as grotesque as those inhabiting Dante’s Inferno. Harrison is either Mephistopheles, bring Stella to the cusp of signing away her soul (represented here by her chastity) or Lucifer himself, presiding over this scene. But Louie somehow redeems Stella, perhaps by admitting her own unchasteness, her own infidelity to her absent soldier husband, excusing herself as just trying to be friendly, no worse than the dog. This is the trigger that seems to release Stella from the devil’s clutch.

Selected quotes:

• “She had found all men to be one way funny like Tom - no sooner were their lips unstuck from your own than they began to utter morality.” (Ch 1)
• “A scale or two adhered to the fishmonger's marble slab; the pastrycook’s glass shelves showed a range of interesting crumbs; the fruiterer filled a longstanding void with fans of cardboard bananas and a ‘Dig for Victory’ placard; the greengrocer’s crates had been emptied of all but earth by those who had somehow failed to dig hard enough.” (Ch 4)
• “One thing he should do at once is take the roof off the house, or they’ll be popping nuns in before you can say knife.” (Ch 4)
• “The dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence - not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living - felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day ... drawing on this tomorrow they had expected.” (Ch 5)
• “The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned.” (Ch 5)
• “If I’d seemed to dream I saw a chap at the foot of my bed going through my pockets, I’d take a look through my pockets first thing next morning.” (Ch 7)
• “Whatever has been buried, surely, corrupts? Nothing keeps innocence innocent but daylight. ... how can any truth not go bad from being underground?” (Ch 12)
• “Anne, if you keep saying ‘I know’ you will have to go back to bed immediately. As it is, you will go back to bed at once.” (Ch 14)

March 2023; 389 pages

First publsished by Jonathan Cape in 1949

My Vintage Classics paperback edition was issued in 1998

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

"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner

 

Wow.

This novel about the decline of the southern US Compson family is written in four parts (some editions have a fifth appendix):

• A stream-of-consciousness from the perspective of Benjy, the youngest child of the family, a 'loony' who can't speak and so voices his feelings by crying and bellowing. Because this represents the interior monologue of a 'loony' it has minimal punctuation, breaks into italic sporadically, and jumps around in time (and since Benjy is 33, this can involve 30 years of memories). These things make it very difficult to read. Nevertheless, for an author, this is the most stimulating section. It challenges. Perhaps the reason that it is so difficult is that at this stage of the book your don't know the characters and you don't know what is going on.
• A rather more coherent stream-of-consciousness from Quentin, set in 1910 at Harvard, during the period immediately leading up to Quentin's suicide. This part is chronologically separated from the others by eighteen years. 
• A still more coherent monologue from Jason, set the day before the first part. We really start to understand how horrid he is, and his wickedness stems from fundamental resentment. I imagine he could represent the white people of the southern US states. He knows that his family, once proud, is declining: his mum is a hypochondriac invalid, his eldest brother committed suicide (and after a part of the family land was sold off so that Quentin could study at Harvard, a chance Jason never got), his younger brother is a 'loony', and his sister had a child by a man who was not her husband (leading to a divorce, which led to the withdrawal of the job at the bank that Jason had been promised) and now makes money by, so Jason thinks, whoring. He is the one who works and keeps the family afloat, including feeding six PoC servants (he sees his 'house niggers' as shiftless and sponging off him). He revenges himself on his family by stealing his niece's allowance.
• A section, set the day after the first section, told in the third person and following loyal family servant Dilsey. In this section we discover what is going on. Interestingly, this section has what I thought were the best descriptions, perhaps because it conformed most to my preconceptions of literary style but on the other hand perhaps because when you are trapped within an interior monologue as deeply as Faulkner's narrators are you can't describe things (but I think Bally can, in my novel Bally and Bro, because he is an artist, like the narrator in the Asher Lev books of Chaim Potok (here and here)). 

Such a fascinating, challenging and complex book can only be a literary masterpiece. I doubt that any review can do it justice, certainly not one that is based on only one reading. I will therefore read it again, and again, and this review will be evolved to reflect my growing understanding of the book.

I also need to read other books. Faulkner wrote about Quentin and Shreve and Father in Absalom, Absalom!; characters from AA appear in Flags in the Dust.

What follows may contain spoilers

Characters

• Mother (Miss Caroline, called by the PoC characters 'Miss Cahline') who is a hypochondriacal invalid
• Father, who is dead by the time Benjy's monologue is set (Easter Saturday 1928). 
• Mother's brother Uncle Maury, who 'borrows' his sister's money to invest is disastrous 'get rich quick' schemes
• Benjy, a 'loony', who can't speak and communicates by crying and bellowing. The title of the book quotes Macbeth who said that life was "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing"; Benjy is the idiot who tells the first part of the tale.
• Quentin, Benjy's oldest brother, who commits suicide at the end of the second section of the book, set in 1910, by jumping off the bridge over the river Charles near Harvard. Cliff's notes compares Quentin to Hamlet, endlessly analysing the situation and therefore paralyzed until the last, disastrous moment. It suggests that Quentin kills himself because he is fearful of forgetting his grief over Caddy's promiscuity and believes that life is meaningless if grief can be forgotten. I thought Quentin might be gay. In his monologue he recalls confessing to his father that Caddy and he committed incest but his father seems to believe that Quentin is a virgin; others seem to refer to Quentin's best friend, Shreve, as his 'husband'. Noel Polk (2005) notes several indicators of Quentin's homosexuality, including the fact that when, following Quentin's arrest for kidnapping a little girl, he sees Shreve, Shjreve is wearing Quentin's pants and Quentin notes that they fit him "like a glove" suggesting that Quentin is observing Shreve's genitals; that Quentin's actual arrest is accompanied by the sight of half-naked and naked young men, presumably the boys whom Quentin has been watching swimming; and the fact that Quentin can't lose his virginity. 
• Candace ('Caddy') Benjy's sister, who is a little promiscuous and marries because she is pregnant (with, we presume, another man's child) which leads to her being divorced and leaving the family to live, we presume, on immoral earnings.
• Jason, Benjy's other brother, who ends up supporting the family, full of resentment and wounded pride, and embezzling most of the allowance that Caddy sends for her daughter
• Miss Quentin, Caddy's daughter.
• Dilsey, the PoC who is the Compson's housekeeper and cook, her husband Roskus, 
• Versh and TP, Caddy's sons and her daughter Frony, 
• Luster, Frony's son, who is looking after Benjy in the first, third and fourth sections of the book. Luster has aspirations to become a musician.

Themes

The Compsons are a family in decline and symbolise the decline of the Southern US planter aristocracy whose wealth had been based on cotton plantations using black slavery. This decline is seen in the children of the family: Quentin commits suicide, Caddy is promiscuous, Jason steals his niece's allowance and Benjy is an inarticulate 'loony'. Mother has withdrawn from the world as a hypochondriac invalid, leaving the upbringing of her children to the family 'nigger' Dilsey and her children. Jason is angry about the dishonour implied by Caddy getting pregnant out of wedlock and furiously resentful of his family's decline, symbolised by the sale of land in order to fund Quentin's Harvard education.

Selected quotes:

• "Et ego in arcadi I have forgotten the latin for hay" (pt 2)
• "When he was seventeen I said to him one day 'What a shame that you should have a mouth like that it should be on a girl's face' ... 'Mother' he said 'it often is'" (pt 2)
• "Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature." (pt 2)
• "all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls have been thrown away" (pt 2)
• "watching pennies has healed more scars than jesus" (pt 2)
• "you'll have one hell of a time in heaven, without anybody's business to meddle in" (pt 3)
• "the only mistake he ever made was he got careless one day and died" (pt 3)
• "A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries where they swung in raucous tilt" (pt 4)
• "that dead and stereotyped transience of rooms in assignation houses" (pt 4)

March 2023; 224 pages

Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Here is a list of other laureates.

Other books of his that are reviewed in this blog include:

• Sanctuary
• As I Lay Dying

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