"Terrorist" by John Updike

I haven't read Updike before (another in a very long line of authors I should have read). I don't know whether this was a good book to start. I only know that it was a superb read.

As a thriller it has, perhaps, too slow a build but when the climax comes the last pages are utterly unputdownable and the will he won't he question is only answered with less than five pages to go. But it is too well written and the characters are too real and multi-dimensional to be a thriller.

It centres on Ahmad, a serious young man about to graduate from high school, the offspring of an aging hippy, red-haired, Irish, health assistant-cum-painter and an absent Egyptian father. Ahmad has been attending the mosque and studying the Koran since he was 11; he is virginal, clean-living and convinced that God is inside him and with him. His perspective on America provides Updike with pages of beautifully written condemnation of consumerism, immorality, greed and selfishness in the archetypal New Jersey town of New Prospect. Ahmad visits a church (because he is invited by African-American Joryleen whom he fancies the pants off, but stays pure) and has a near fight with Joryleen's boyfriend and talks to his guidance counsellor Mr Levy and learns to drive a truck for a furniture firm.

Updike achieves the difficult task of putting flesh and blood upon this strange religious boy. He is moved by temptation. He is afraid. He loves his mother even as he understands her weaknesses (she has a lot of temporary boyfriends). He even has doubts about his Koranic teachers (though never about being with God).

The other major character is Mr Levy, the school guidance counsellor. He is a secular Jew, born of a lapsed Jewish father who embraced communism. His wife, Beth, is a fat, lazy American woman who works in a library (but the passages written from her viewpoint make her much much more than a stock character). Mr Levy takes an interest in Ahmad (and a greater interest in his mother): he feels Ahmad is too bright to waste his life driving a truck.

There are beautiful passages from this book. The struggle for Beth to pick up the remote control she has dropped on the floor. The confrontation between Ahmad and Joryleen's boyfriend. The relationship between Ahmad and his co-driver, Charlie. The fabulous, life affirming walk that Ahmad takes to his truck: "An unseen dog in a house barks at the shadow-sound of Ahmad passing on the sidewalk. A ginger coloured cat with one blind eye like a crazed white marble is huddling close to the front screen door as it waits to be let in; it arches its back and flashes a golden spark from its narrowed good eye .... The air tingles on Ahmad's face but there is not enough of a drizzle to soak his shirt." Four pages later, however, he is less happy. "The shabbiness in the streets, the fast-food trash and broken plastic toys, the unpainted steps and porches still dark from the morning's dampness, the windows cracked and not repaired .... Women's voices rise from back rooms in merciless complaint against children who were born uninvited and now collect, neglected around the only friendly voices in their hearing, those from the television set."

This is a superb book by a writer on top of his form.

June 2009, 310 pages

"Reading the Oxford English Dictionary" by Ammon Shea

This weird book describes the year that Ammon Shea took to read the entire, 20 volume, 21,730 page Oxford English Dictionary.

There are, unsurprisingly, 26 chapters. Each chapter gives a little background about events that happened during the year such as the Convention for Lexicographers he attended all of whom thought that reading the OED was mad. This autobiographical fragment is then followed by his favourite words for the appropriate letter.

It sounds like a dreadfully boring book but actually it is quite funny. Some of the words are delightful and some are bizarre. The little commentaries he gives on each word are often gems. Often he is delighted to find a word for something he did not think needed to be named. Sometimes the definitions are enthralling.

Favourite word: "Unbepissed (adj) Not having been urinated on. Unwet with urine." (p188). As Shea points out, one must live a strange life is being wet with urine is the norm.

A strange book with delights for vocabularians (p194) such as myself but beware: I started mentioning some of the words to my family and they did not want to know!

"The name of Isaac Bickerstaff Steele borrowed from his friend Swift, who, just before the establishment of the Tatler, had borrowed it from a shoemaker's shop-board, and used it as the name of an imagined astrologer, who should be an astrologer indeed, and should attack John Partridge, the chief of the astrological almanack makers, with a definite prediction of the day and hour of his death. This he did in a pamphlet that brought up to the war against one stronghold of superstition an effective battery of satire. " Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer by Richard Steele. Papers from Steele's Tatler by Henry Morley http://schulers.com/books/ri/i/ISAAC_BICKERSTAFF/ [Accessed 20th June 2009]


The book containing the collection of early Tatlers became known as The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff. Lucubration, which means to study or meditate, literally means to work by artifical light.

Later an Isaac Bickerstaffe was a playwright who had some success with The Hypocrite (1769), a play that starred a hypocrite called Mawworm. "Irish playwright whose farces and comic operas were popular in the late 18th century. There is no apparent connection between his name and the pseudonym earlier adopted by Jonathan Swift and also used by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele for The Tatler. " Encyclopaedia Britannica http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/64674/Isaac-Bickerstaffe [Accessed 20th June 2009].

June 2009, 223 pages

"The Immoralist" by Andre Gide

The hero narrator, Michel, is a student of archaeology and paleography. He gets married (one feels it is an arranged match) and travels into North Africa for his honeymoon. On the journey he discovers he has tuberculosis. He nearly dies. As he convalesces he realises that there is more to life than thoughts and ideas; there is a world of sense and feeling. He begins to appreciate the beauty of the landscape and the Arab boys in it. After recovering and returning to his old life he becomes more and more drawn towards sensuality. Then his wife becomes ill...

It is a strange tale. The "story in a story" device dresses it up as a true story yet the author carefully contrives an artificially symmetrical plot. The other main character is his wife; she is a goody two shoes but a cipher; she has no character of her own (perhaps this is because the narrator is so absorbed in himself). It is a tale based on the idea that the world of ideas is not enough; he uses words (beautifully) to convey sensations. The implication is that the narrator plunges into immorality although his actual actions are remarkably chaste (he even blushes when accused of preferring boys to his new wife). Perhaps this was racy in 1902.

The basic idea is that we are sensuous animals which the civilized world covers with a veneer of respectability. Why? Most people "believe that it is only by constraint that they can get any good out of themselves" (p 100). Yet "of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know but one" (p105). Even memories fade, shrivel and decay. Live for today! "Let every moment carry away with it all that it brought" (p107).

But these interesting and controversial ideas are in a book of elegant prose and devastating beauty. Shadows are "transparent and mobile" (p 38). "The song of the flute flowed on" (p 41). "The regular palm trees, bereft of colour and life, seemed struck for ever motionless" (p 47). "This African land ... had lain submerged for many long days and was now awaking from its winter sleep, drunken with water, bursting with the fresh rise of sap; throughout it ran the wild laughter of an exultant spring..." (p 46).

He is particularly lyrical about male beauty. Although the only sex acts are heterosexual there is little doubt where the author's interest lies. Lachmi showed "a golden nudity beneath his flowing garment" (p 42). Moktir "did not irritate me (because of his good looks perhaps)" (p 44). Charles is "a fine strong young fellow, so exuberantly healthy, so lissom, so well-made..." (p75). A Sicilian boy is "beautiful as a line of Theocritus, full of colour, and odour and savour, like a fruit" (p 144).

A book of fascinating ideas and gorgeous prose.

June 2009, 158 pages

Andre Gide won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Other Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Iron Kingdom" by Christopher Clark

Iron Kingdom is subtitled The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947. It tells the history of the Hohenzollern dynasty and beyond from their days as Electors in Brandenburg, the Mark around Berlin through their becoming kings in Prussia, one of their possessions which lay outside the Holy Roman Empire and so could become a Kingdom, through the Bismarckian conquest and unification of Prussia into Germany and the Hohenzollerns becoming Kaisers of the new Reich, through the dynasty's end with the closure of the First World War, to the decreed abolition of Prussia after the Second World War.

It is a well written book in that it alternates my kind of history (kings and battles) with social history so that I never got too bored by the latter. It is however, long (688 pages); despite this there were times when I wanted to know more. There were moments when I felt the author assumed I knew more than I did: for example, he talks about thalers and groschen as if I can understand their relative values. At other times he is simply too brief. There is almost no mention of either the First or Second World War as if these were German events which did not affect Prussia. I would have liked to know more about Kaiser Bill and the Franco-Prussian war.

There are times when the language departs from academic and becomes more compelling: his description of a poetic epic containing fragmented scenes as being like a film shot with a hand-held camcorder is evocative.

The author does not like Hindenburg! Hindenburg was c-in-c of German forces on the Eastern front during the First World War. "He blackmailed the Kaiser, to whom he professed the deepest personal loyalty .... it was a systematic insubordination born of vast ambition and an utter disregard of any interest or authority outside the military hierarchy he himself dominated ... Hindenburg deliberately cultivated the national obsession with his own person, projecting an image of an indomitable German warrior .... Although Hindenburg was among those who urged William II to abdicate and flee to Holland in November 1918, he subsequently shrouded himself in the mantle of a principled monarchism .... In the last days of September 1918, Hindenburg urgently pressed the German civilian government to initiate ceasefire negotiations, yet he later disassociated himself entirely from the resulting peace, leaving the civilians to carry the responsibility and the opprobrium. On 17 June 1919, when the government of Friedrich Ebery was deliberating over whether to accept the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Hindenburg conceded in writing that further military resistance would be hopeless. Yet .... he claimed in November 1919 ... that the German armies in the field had not been vanquished by the enemy powers, but by a cowardly 'stab in the back' from the home front .... As a military commander and later as Germany's head of state, Hindenburg broke virtually every bond he entered into. He was not the man of dogged, faithful service, but the man of image, manipulation and betrayal." (pages 653-4)

June 2009, 688 pages

"The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction. My favourite was his first, Hawksmoor. This present book is one of my least favourite.

There is a twist right at the end but it was heavy going. Ackroyd weaves a story about the fictional character Frankenstein which purports to explain how the novel, Frankenstein, was written. The action oscillates between Geneva, Oxford and London. There are deaths, resurrectionists and a certain amount of philosophical discussion about the nature of God's act of creation and how men might 'Play God'.

But it is mostly tedious stuff. In my review of Thames: Sacred River in this wiki I complain of Ackroyd's tendency to list; this present novel seems like a list of all his research (it also advertises a number of his other books!):

• Frankenstein comes from the village of Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc. Mary Shelley visited Chamonix and set an encounter between Frankenstein and his monster here.
• Frankenstein meets Shelley (whom he calls Bysshe) in Oxford shortly before Shelley is sent down for writing (anonymously) "The Necessity for Atheism".
• Subsequently, Frankenstein goes with Shelley to London where he meets Daniel Westbrook and his sister Harriet. Shelley later elopes with Harriet. Harriet was of a much higher class in real life than in the book but she did become Shelley's first wife.
• In London, Frankenstein attends a lecture given by Sir Humphrey Davy, whose work on galvanising cats he has already read.
• Shelley and Frankenstein watch a theatrical production of Melmoth the Wanderer, a gothic novel about a man who sells his soul to the devil for an extra 150 years of life and then spends the time trying to find someone to relieve him of this burden. Oscar Wilde later used the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth after his enforced sojourn in Reading Gaol. Ackroyd has previously written The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde.
• Frankenstein hears of famous anatomist John Hunter whose life parallels that of Frankenstein: they both live for some time on Jermyn Street and they both experiment on dogs. Whilst dissecting corpses Frankenstein meets Jack Keat (John Keats) who has consumption. Keats however studied at Guys rather than St Thomas Hospital (as in this book) and Hunter studied at St George Hospital.
• Frankenstein reads Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", a book about unrequited love.
• On page 165 the monster points at Frankenstein and declaims "Thou art the man" which is the title of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Ackroyd wrote a biography of Poe.
• Frankenstein meets Shelley with new girlfriend Mary Godwin (who wrote Frankenstein) at Marlow. They go boating on the Thames. Mary sees the face of the monster at her window, although she initially thinks this is a dream. Mary asks where the source of the Thames is and a debate ensues. Later she mentions the theory that the Thames and the Rhine were once the same river. Ackroyd researched these in his previous book Thames: Sacred River.
• Frankenstein meets Byron and Dr Polidori. They will be present at the house party when Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein. Polidori writes The Vampyre, the first English vampire novel, as a result of this house party. Byron uses the phrase "The Modern Prometheus" to Shelley; this will become the subtitle of Frankenstein. Polidori talks to Frankenstein about the Golem (a monster made of clay and given life by Kabbalistic incantations); this presumably links to Ackroyd's earlier novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Limehouse is, of course, the district where, in this novel, Frankenstein's laboratory lies.
• The penultimate act of the story takes place in the Villa Diodati where the famous ghost story telling competition is held. Later Shelley is drowned as he was in real life (though not till 1822)
• On page 262, Byron quotes from Paradise Lost. Ackroyd has previously written Milton in America.

A disappointment from a gifted writer. Perhaps he is writing too much these days.

Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein is much better!

May 2009, 296 pages

"Wise Children" by Angela Carter

"What a joy it is to dance and sing!"

I first read this book in March 2009; I re-read it over ten years later in October 2019 and, I am ashmed to say, I didn't remember I had read it the first time.

On her 75th birthday, Dora Chance tells the story of her life with twin sister Nora. The Lucky Chances were a dance act during the declining days of variety but what really set them apart was the interlocking of their lives with the Hazard dynasty of classical actors including their father Melchior, who is celebrating his 100th birthday. Twins, bastards and intra-family affairs permeate this romp through this comedy of the legitimate and the illegitimate theatre.

This is a fantasy, a fairy tale. It is often necessary to willingly and consciously suspend one's disbelief; the pay off in entertainment terms is well worth it. Coincidences abound (there are 5 sets of twins; Nora and Dora share their 75th birthday with their father Melchior (and his twin Peregrine) and Shakespeare. Peregrine is a magician; he arrives out of the blue at key dramatic moments and then disappears (in one case presumed dead) and then returns having made a fortune out of gold, or oil, or... A lot of Perry's back story is secret.

There are many Shakespearean themes (twins, fathers) and motifs:

• Melchior's father murdered his mother and her (presumed) lover and then committed suicide after he had played Othello to her Desdemona (and the presumed lover was playing Iago); later Melchior plays Othello and marries HIS Desdemona
• Tiff goes mad on live TV, carrying flowers, singing a song and subsequently drowning, like Ophelia in Hamlet;
• The twins dance as fairies in a film version of Midsummer Night's Dream starring their father and written by their uncle.
• At the end of the filming there is a triple marriage in which Dora avoids matrimony by substituting for herself the previous bride of the man who wants to marry her; thus more or less replicating the 'bed trick' in Measure for Measure.
• Lady Atalanta is cast out of her house by her two evil daughters, as Lear is cast from his kingdom by his Goneril and Regan.
• The musical show What? You Will! is the alternative title for Twelfth Night which features a pair of twins
• And of course all those bloody twins and the fact that some of them look so alike that lovers don't know with whom they are sleeping.

Birthday parties throughout are excruciating occasions full of betrayal and unhappiness. The funniest moment of the book comes when Melchior gives his twin daughters Saskia and Imogen (who aren't actually his daughters) a present at their 21st birthday: the present is a new step mother.

As well as twins, mirrors crop up as a theme. Deefholts explains in detail that the theme of the twins is in itself a theme of reflection, with the mirror image often being the literally perverted or evil aspect. Dualities include illegitimacy (explicitly characterised as the 'left side') versus legitimacy, Dora versus Nora, the "legit" theatre vs the music halls, north London vs South London, Peregrine vs Melchior, Nora and Dora vs Saskia and Imogen, Tristan vs Gareth etc

This book is immense fun and an exhilarating read. It has been turned into a stage show by Emma Rice.

Books by Angela Carter that I have read and reviewed in this blog:

• The Bloody Chamber, a brilliant collection of short stories in which fairy tales are brought up to date and given a horrid, and often feminist, twist
• The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman: a very sixties psychedelic romp, perhaps too surreal for me
• Heroes and Villains: a post-holocaust fantasy
• The Passion of New Eve: obsessed with mirrors and sex changes and dominatrices
• Wise Children: the reminiscences of one of a pair of show-biz twins; multiple references to twins and Shakespeare
• The Magic Toyshop: a beautifully written coming of age story

The real strength of this book is the voice of the narrator, a seventy-five year old ex-showgirl born into the illegitimate side of a great theatrical family and growing old disgracefully in Brixton. This wonderful voice is reflected in so many great moments:

• “She said: ‘Yes!’ to life and I said, ‘Maybe ...” (C 1)
• “We’re stuck in the period at which we peaked, of course. All women do.” (C 1)
• “The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle” (C 1)
• “These cheekbones are descended from some of the most profitable calcium deposits in the world. Like all those who spend much time before the public eye, our father has always been dependent on his bone structure.” (C 1)
• “Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they’d frighten little children.” (C 1)
• “His stock in trade is boyish charm. God knows what he’ll do when he loses that.” (C 1)
• “Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.” (C 1)
• “Ranulph, lean, haggard, bearded, more and more resembled John the Baptist had John the Baptist reached old age.” (C 1)
• “An actor’s inheritance of unpaid bills, paste jewellery, flash attitudes” (C 1)
• “She didn’t so much talk as elocute. She rhymed ‘sky’ with ‘bay’, and made ‘mountaynes’ out of ‘molehills.” (C 1)
• “I couldn’t look a cabbage in the eye after what Grandma did to them. Boiled them to perdition. The abattoir is kinder to a cow.” (C 1)
• “Gareth and Tristram, the priest and the game-show presenter. Not so different, really, I suppose. Both of them in show business. Both, in their different ways, carrying on the great tradition of the Hazard family – the willing suspension of disbelief. Both of them promise you a free gift if you play the game.” (C 1)
• “She’d got it bad and Tristram wasn’t worth the paper she wiped her bum with.” (C 1)
• “Her cheeks give the game away; they’ve got that tight, full, shiny chipmunk look that spells out: facelift.” (C 1)
• “The stately progress of the tram, occupying by right of bulk and majesty the centre of the road, not veering to the left nor right upon its way but sometimes swaying every now and then with a sickening lurch, like Grandma, coming home from the pub.” (C 2)
• “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay, too. Well. Not always.” (C 2)
• “He stripped off only to reveal a gee-string of very respectable dimensions, more of a gee-gee string, would have kept a horse decent.” (C 2)
• “Nora was always free with it and threw her heart away as if it were a used bus ticket.” (C 2)
• “She had a passion to know about Life, all its dirty corners.” (C 2)
• “Each time she fell in love, she fell in love for the first time, no matter how many times she fell in love.” (C 2)
• “Ambition, the curse and glory of the Hazards, who’ll risk everything they’ve got and a little bit more on a throw of the dice.” (C 2)
• “A nudist might be able to grow old gracefully in the company of other ageing nudists, but she had the misfortune to live with two teenage sexpots.” (C 2)
• “Lynde Court was built in the eclectic style, that is, a little bit of this and that.” (C 2)
• “Then I spotted Saskia. She, oblivious of her distracted mother, was tucked away under a rosebush, pigging it. She’d dragged out with her the entire carcass of the swan from the Great Hall. Its feathers were so blackened by the soot it looked more like an upstart crow but that didn’t put the little greedyguts off.” (C 2)
• “Then I understood the thing I’d never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I’d wanted to be ephemeral, I’d wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you.” (C 3)
• “They kept themselves to themselves, away from the hoi polloi, held tea parties on Saturday afternoons when everybody else was having group sex, played cricket on Sundays, drank pink gin at sundown and talked as if their upper lips wore plaster casts.” (C 3)
• “It’s the American tragedy in a nutshell. They look around the world and think: ‘There must be something better!’ But there isn’t. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now." (C 3)
• "As if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you lose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows live longer than you do.” (C 3)
• “Everywhere a threadbare, expensive shabbiness that had a class to which we knew we never could aspire. Not the Lucky Chances. We were doomed to either flash or squalor.” (C 4)
• “We painted the faces that we always used to have on to the faces we have now.” (C 4)
• “Given the history of fathers in our family, it seemed only right and proper we should have finally turned up a celibate one – a non-combatant, as it were.” (C 5)
• “But there you are; no silver lining without a cloud.” (C 5)
• “Saskia ... was ... unique amongst mammals, a cold-blooded cow.” (C 5)
• “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.” (C 5)
• “A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.” (C 5)
• “He was not the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once, the curtain call of my career as lover.” (C 5)
• “‘If the child is father of the man,’ she asked, ‘then who is the mother of the woman?’” (C 5)
• “Has it ever occurred to you to spare a passing thought as to the character of the deceased Mrs Lear? Didn’t it ever occur to you that Cordelia might have taken after her mother while the other girls . . .” (C 5)
• “There was a house we all had in common and it was called, the past, even though we’d lived in different rooms.” (C 5)

Shakespeare with a nod to Spanish picaresques and Voltaire's Candide.

May 2009 and October 2019, 232 pages

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

"Where Angels Fear To Tread" by E. M. Forster

In this short, delightful comedy an English widow travels to Italy, falls in love and marries an 'unsuitable' young Italian man, the son of a (shock, horror) dentist. She dies having a son by him.
The family of her first husband decide the baby must be brought up in England and travel to Italy to retrieve the child. The central question asked by the book is "Do you want the child to stop with his father, who loves him and will bring him up badly, or do you want him to come to Sawston, where no one loves him, but where he will be brought up well." (p130)

The novel vividly portrays the suffocating bloodlessness of the English Middle Classes for whom correct grammar is more important than passionate prose; for whom doing the right thing supersedes enjoying your life.

The principal characters:

• Lilia the widow who has been trapped by her in-laws after her husband's death and longs to escape their clutches; her marriage is, however, unhappy although the letter to her daughter describing her misery is intercepted by her mother-in-law and destroyed.
• Philip, her brother-in-law, the main protagonist, who is a disinterested spectator of life, who loves the Tuscan sunset because the guide books tell him how marvellous it is. His best expectation of life is to be an honourable failure, and of course he is.
• Harriet, the sister-in-law, a dour, determined, low Church woman whose certainty that she is right blinds her to any other points of view.
• Caroline, Lilia's companion on the Italian trip, a sensible, church-going woman, who reacts to events in Italy with hysteria.
• Mrs Herriton, Lilia's mother-in-law, the spider at the centre of the web, who has dominated her children and her friends with her complacent self-belief.
• Gino, the classic macho Italian, for whom life is good if you are a man in Italy, who doesn't really understand anyone else but who loves his son: "He is mine; mine for ever. Even if he hates me he will be mine. He cannot help it; he is made out of me; I am his father." (p121)

The modern reader is immediately appalled by the arrogance of the English family in their self-satisfied belief that they are inevitably right. The widow's daughter, staying in England, is not even told of the existence of her little brother, despite her mother dying in childbirth, because this would upset her. The retrieval of the baby is only mooted because it might bring discredit on the family. However, a strength of the novel is that nowhere is this arrogant self-assurance tackled; it is merely assumed and described.

The hallmark of a really good book is the way the author brings the characters to life. Forster's writing is of its time, clipped and stagey like a drawing room comedy, but the characters are immediately real. Brilliant!

Also read Howards End and A Room With a View and Maurice.

Points:

One thing that infuriates me about authors is when they quote something in a foreign language and assume that their readers will recognise the quote or be able to translate it. On page 29, Signor Carella quotes Dante's Inferno:

"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

Che la diritta via era smarrita"

My Italian is poor but this means roughly:

"In the middle of the track of our life

I rediscovered myself by a dark wood

Where the direct road was lost."

Philip, Harriet and Caroline go to the opera in Italy to see Lucia di Lammermoor. This is the opera featured in Mme Bovary, a fact which is referred to in the text.

In the room that acts as a memorial to the dead Lilia ("if we shall resent anything on earth at all, we shall resent the consecration of a deserted room" p109) a "coon song lay open on the piano". Clearly this word was not taboo when Forster was writing.

"A wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy." (p121)

May 2009, 160 pages

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

"Escape from the Antarctic" by Sir Ernest Shackleton

This tiny book tells a fraction of the story of The Endurance commanded by Shackleton which was attempting to land men for a trans-Antarctic expedition when it was caught in pack ice; after some months drifting the ship was crushed and the men had to camp on the drifting ice floe; they then got into two small boats and headed for Elephant Island where they camped. This book completes their adventures from this point.

Shackleton and five others sailed a small boat through mountainous seas 800 miles to South Georgia. Just sighting the sun through a sextant in a pitching boat in the middle of a hurricane when there was precious little sun made the navigation difficult, almost impossible. They endured days of hurricane and gale. When they reached South Georgia they had to stand away from the shore because the seas were driving the boat inland and threatened to smash it on the rocks. Finally they made landfall and captured baby albatross chicks to stew.

Then Shackleton and two others trekked across the South Georgia mountains which had never been crossed, or even explored, before. Finally they reached the whaling station and obtained relief for their crew mates. Even then it was weeks before they could charter a ship which could penetrate the newly forming pack ice and rescue the 22 men abandoned on Elephant Island.

Sometimes Shackleton gets bogged down in the details and this story is marred by only being a fraction of the full adventure but it was a delightful little read.

Selected quotes:

• "At midnight I was at the tiller and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky between the south and southwest .... a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty-six years' experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days."

• "I know that during the long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, 'Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.'" It is this paragraph that led T. S. Eliot to write in The Waste Land:

"Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you"

May 2009, 90 pages

Other books about travel and exploration reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This novel was originally written by Mary Ann Shaffer; Annie Barrows took over after Mary Ann became ill. Both authors are American.

It is written in the form of letters (except for a small diary near the very end). It is set shortly after the end of the second world war. Dawsey Adams, a small holder in Guernsey, writes to Juliet Ashton, a writer, about Charles Lamb. He reveals the existence of the eponymous society which was set up during the German occupation of Guernsey. As the correspondence continues, Juliet learns more about the lives of the islanders under occupation and begins to fall in love with Guernsey. A lot of the stories she reads deal with Elizabeth, who was taken from the island for sheltering a slave worker and is now missing.

It is a charming tale in many ways but there were one or two features that rather grated with me:

• There are so many weird names. Elizabeth is normal and Juliet, Sophie, Amelia and Sidney are OK but there are also Eben and Eli, Markham, Dawsey, Isola and "Billy Bee" (there are all first names!!!). Surely during the period of austerity after the war English names were as reserved as their manners!
  
• Equally, the books chosen by the members of the literary society suggest a checklist of "good" books chosen because they are classics rather than because they might have been read at the time. Even the writer, Juliet, is famous for writing Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War for The Spectator (and she wrongly credits the creation of Bickerstaff to Addison rather than Steele).
  
• The author has clearly done a lot of research into occupied Guernsey and isn't going to waste it. Some of the letters,written by characters who do not reappear, seem to be included just so another story can be told.
  
• There is an atrocious little sub-plot involving a pantomime villain seeking to steal some letters which are, of course, by Oscar Wilde. This sub-plot was entirely unnecessary and made the willing suspension of disbelief suddenly a little harder.
  
• Equally there is an unlikely legacy to enrich the happy ever after ending.
  
• One of the characters revealed his homosexuality to another character. Not only was this also unlikely since homosexuality was, at the time, a criminal offence; it was also totally unnecessary for the purpose of the plot. Sometimes it seems that every American book nowadays has to have at least one gay character in case the author is accused of discrimination.
  

Having said all that, the book was interesting and elegantly written and I did want to find out what had happened to Elizabeth and whether Juliet was going to marry the right man. Chick Lit.

May 2009, 240 pages

"Blenheim" by Charles Spencer

I have also read "Prince Rupert" by this author which is probably a better book if only because the subject is easier. A life, especially one as colourful as Prince Rupert's, has a natural structure and the episodes in a long life lend themselves easily to a narrative. Blenheim is rather more difficult: the first section describes the political conditions of Europe during the latter part of Louis XIV (the Sun King)'s reign; it goes on to describe the career of Marlborough and his partner general at Blenheim, Prince Eugene of Savoy; then there is the dash across Europe from the Netherlands to Bavaria; and finally the battle itself. I am not an aficionado of military history (I know very little about army life) and consequently I am in no position to judge whether Spencer's verdicts on the armies, the generals and the battle have any validity at all. Certainly there seemed to be a significant element of luck in Blenheim and a certain amount of Marlborough's vaunted military prowess seemed to consist in sending squadrons (or are they battalions) of soldiers straight at an enemy position and then slogging it out. Had the opposing general attacked as Marlborough's men were crossing a marshy stream instead of waiting till they were firmly established on the near bank and had he not ordered a significant portion of his army to hold the little village of Blindheim (not Blenheim!) at any cost which allowed Marlborough to encircle them and pen them in until the rest of the battle had been won, things might have gone very differently. When one reads books like this what you most realise is how incompetent everyone seems to be. The French general was so short-sighted he had to have his aides describe the battle to him. One of the Allied generals was so cautious he would only permit the army to besiege towns rather than fight battles; Blenheim was won while he was away besieging. Generals would refuse to combine their forces because they didn't like one another. I am sure (I think) that it is just the benefit of hindsight that allows this perspective but it does sometimes seem as if the world is run by fools. 

 May 2009, 342 pages

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

"Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut

This is a strange little book written in 1969. It starts with the author telling us that "All this happened, more or less." The first chapter describes the author writing the book; the author also appears in the story: the hero, Billy Pilgrim, meets an American soldier in the latrines; "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

Another oddity is that every time someone dies (which is frequently) the moment is marked with the sentence "So it goes."

A third oddity is that Billy Pilgrim is able to travel forwards and backwards in time. This enables the author to jump around his hero's life and intercut the main narrative, Billy's war adventures, with what happens to him subsequently.

A fourth oddity is that Billy is kidnapped by aliens on a flying saucer and taken back to their planet and exhibited in a zoo (they also kidnap a soft porn actress and bring her back so he has someone to mate with). One suspects that this part of Billy's life (and possibly the time travel) has been caused by brain damage suffered during a plane crash (it is only afterwards that Billy tells other people of his alien experiences) and his extensive reading of the science fiction of a little known author called Kilgore Trout (who one further suspects is an alter ego of Vonnegut; Trout appears in other Vonnegut books).

The visit to Tralfamadore teaches Billy about the nature of time. The Tralfamadorians are able to perceive the fourth dimension. The can see present, past and future. They say it is like a landscape: there are beautiful bits and ugly bits. Having a good time is inevitable; having a bad time is inevitable. These moments are all written into the landscape. The secret of happiness, for the Tralfamadorians is to enjoy the beautiful places in a landscape and let your eyes skip over the ugly places.

The structure of the novel, with Billy and the reader skipping backwards and forwards in time, and with the intrusion of the author, reflects this concept of time held by the Tralfamadorians. Tralfamadorian novels are also structured this way, randomly jumbled, without narrative thread, and the structure is designed by the author to look beautiful as a photographer structures a scene.

Billy's soft porn mate has a locket between her bare breasts on which are engraved the words: "God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference."

This simply written book, inspired by the fire bombing of Dresden when more lives were lost than at Hiroshima, is matter-of-factly tolerant of humanity. Billy impregnates his (Earth) wife to make his son who will become a Green Beret in Vietnam: "Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia ... 'Would you talk about the war now, if I wanted you to?' said Valencia. In a tiny cavity in her great body she was assembling the materials for a Green Beret." When he and other soldiers are in a communal shower: "Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted. Reproduction was not the main business of the evening."

One of the most delightful moments of the book comes when Billy sees the fire-bombing of Dresden like a film running backwards in time. "The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires .... The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes .... When the bombers got back to their base ....factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mainly women who did this work."

Simple prose that strips people naked and accepts their frailty. "Billy ... assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again." So it goes.

An interesting piece of trivia is that Vonnegut quotes a book from British historian David Irving who writes sympathetically about the German suffering in WWII. This is than same Irving who lost a spectacular libel trial against Penguin and later went to prison in Austria for Nazi sympathies and holocaust denial; he wrote The Destruction of Dresden in 1963. It is nowadays believed that Irving over-estimated the number of people killed in Dresden so Vonnegut's figures are wrong.

May 2009, 157 pages

"Walking on Glass" by Iain Banks

Iain Banks is famous for writing two sorts of novels: mainstream fiction, and sic fi under the name Iain M. Banks.

Walking on Glass, his second novel, is composed of three stories. Graham Park is an Art Student in love with the enigmatic Sara ffitch. The book follows him as he walks to meet her: the chapter headings are the names of the streets he walks through. Steven Grout is a paranoid person who believes that he is an Admiral from the inter-galactic wars imprisoned on Earth: his chapter names are the names of people he encounters; except for his last chapter each starts with an exclamation: sacked! unemployed! social insecurity! drunk! Quiss really is a soldier from the intergalactic wars who is imprisoned in a ruinous castle with Ayaji against whom he has to play endless strange games: each chapter is entitled with the game: one-dimensional chess, open-plan go, spotless dominoes, chinese scrabble and tunnel (like bridge with blank cards).

Their stories intersect. A bit. Sort of.

The Graham story was delightful because he was a lovely young man in love and his best friend was a happily camp gay man. The Quiss story was the funniest, with nonsenses like a machine that chops up statues in the shape of numbers (because it is a number-cruncher) which are made from Plaster of Salt Lake City (like Plaster of Paris only duller). So Banks demonstrates his ability for lyrical description, for entering into the twisted logic of a madman and for weird humour. I was impressed with his writing ability but I'm not sure that I actually enjoyed the book.

May 2009; 239 pages

"The Kit-Cat Club" by Ophelia Field

The Kit-Cat club was started by the publisher Jacob Tonson in London shortly after the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. It contained a mixture of Whig politicians, noblemen and patrons. It originally met in a pub called the Cat and Fiddle (a fiddle was called a 'kit') where a Christopher Catlin ('Kit Cat') cooked fantastic meat pies. (Does the word 'chit-chat' come from the club; it is first used by Steele in 1710?) In its inception it was something of a riposte to Will's Coffee House where Dryden held court.

Amongst the famous Kit-Cat members were playwright Congreve, playwright turned self-made architect John Vanbrugh, Addison and Steele of Tatler and Spectator fame and, later, Robert Walpole. These people wrote and schemed for the continuance of the Whig revolution, keeping William and Mary, and later William, and then Anne, and finally George I on the throne. They experienced and contrived momentous events from the November 5th landing of William in Torbay to the 1708 and 1715 Jacobite rebellions, the formation of the Bank of England, the War of Spanish Succession with Marlborough's victories (Vanbrugh built Blenheim Palace as well as Castle Howard), the Peace of Utrecht, the Act of Union with Scotland, and the French Mississippi Bubble and the British South Sea Bubble (both of which Tonson invested in and got out of before the end becoming incredibly wealthy).

Non-club members including Dryden, Robert Harley and Bolingbroke (crypto-Jacobites), Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift all have parts in this drama.

I learnt that the Tatler started as a weekly broadsheet (double printed and folded in half) which provided a weekly essay for 1d, written anonymously by Richard Steele (later joined by Addison) and purporting to be written by Isaac Bickerstaff. When that came to an end Steele founded (with Addison) The Spectator, in the same format, for the same price but tri-weekly, "written" by Mr Spectator and his mate Sir Roger de Coverley. both these papers were tremendous successes (though Steele could never live within his means and was hounded for debt (including imprisonment) throughout his life.

Addison and Steele were a wonderful contrasting pair. Addison, who wrote slowly alone, academic, dry and thoughtful, very moderate; Steele who wrote at speed in coffee houses surrounded by noise, a drinker, a husband, a father, always in debt. I like Steele best! Together they founded modern journalism.

Points I picked up on:

• Stanhope, club member and later Secretary of State, was MP for Cockermouth.
• Tonson bought a house in Barn Elms near Putney which later became the venue for the Ranelagh Club. Tonson later retired to The Hazels in Ledbury.
• Dr Arbuthnot (a Scot) published The History of John Bull as a Tory answer to the Whig Spectator.
• Steele bought a home in Hampton Wick; he called it The Hovel; the site is now occupied by The Grove, 24 Lower Teddington Road.

A very interesting book. I learned a lot I didn't know before.