"Anna of the Five Towns" by Arnold Bennett

 

The 'five towns' are a fictional representation of the towns that later amalgamated to become Stoke-on-Trent, at the heart of England's pottery industry. This story follows Anna as she comes of age. Living with her young sister in a household dominated by her rich but miserly father, Anna comes of age and into an inheritance. But the demands of wealth, such as squeezing rent out of businesses on the brink of failure, are at odds with the teachings of her Methodist upbringing. There's a young businessman wooing her too. Both father and church have brought her up to see personal sacrifice and duty as more important than personal fulfilment. Should she follow her head or her heart? 

But it seems to me that the author's message is fundamentally a religious one. Towards the end of the book, one of the characters, Willie Price, is described thus: "His eye had the meek wistfulness of Holman Hunt's Scapegoat." (Ch 12) The painting is shown above.  The scapegoat was a real animal that the early Jews used to metaphorically load with their sins and cast out into the wilderness. Some people see the crucified Jesus as a human version of a scapegoat. Is Willie Jesus? That doesn't seem likely, given that he confesses to having committed a crime. And yet, he and his father are persecuted by the Methodist businessmen of the Five Towns, who are hypocrites, like the Pharisees, being somehow able to be religious on church days and ruthless businessmen on others. Anna's father is one of these, a capitalist who makes his money through investments and loans. But when Anna comes of age she discovers that it is she who owns the Price's factory, and she is bullied by her father into demanding the rent of them even when they protest they cannot pay. She regards Willie's father, Titus, as a hypocrite because he says he can't pay and then he finds the money after she threatens him with bankruptcy; she regards him as a hypocrite because, despite owing her money, he is Superintendent of the Sunday School. But isn't Anna, ironically surnamed Tellwright, the hypocrite? Tempted by her father, she tightens the screws on the Prices. The only thing that can be said in her favour is that, after the tragedy, she has a feeling that perhaps what she has done isn't good. But she has done it.

At  the end of the first quarter, Anna is shown as going to a revivalist meeting and there finding herself unable to embrace Jesus, perhaps because she is at least aware of her sinfulness (there are degrees of hypocrisy). This inability to convert is contrasted, close to the end of the book, in chapter 11, when there is a scene between Willie Price and Anna in which something transcendent occurs. He is crying, he tells her she is an angel. "He was her great child, and she knew that he worshipped her. Oh, ineffable power, that out of misfortune canst create divine happiness." The next paragraph starts: "Later, ..." One wonders what went on in those missing moments. It seems to me that this is the moment when Anna is converted. But it's too late, at least for Willie. He is going to Australia, loaded with dishonour, and driven out of this world. Just like the scapegoat.

The five towns are described as "mean and forbidding of aspect - sombre, hard-faced, uncouth; and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys has soiled and shrivelled the surrounding country" (Ch 1). Sounds like a vision of Hell. 

The plot is simple enough and, apart from the protagonist, Anna, and perhaps her wooer, Henry, the characters are scarcely complex: the father is miserly and domineering ("sinister and formidable", Ch 1), the best friend Beatrice is a flibbertigibbet with a heart of gold, sister Agnes is a cheerful and willing workhorse etc. It's very much a Victorian novel, despite being written in 1902. There are hints of melodrama ("without the support of the walls she might have fallen"; Ch 2)and there are passages of stodgy prose ("The latter, boasting lineage and a large house in the aristocratic suburb of Hillport, gave to the society monetary aid and a gracious condescension. But though indubitably above the operation of any unwritten sumptuary law ..."; Ch 1)). Its only real concession to the twentieth century is the careful depiction of the industrial landscape which invites comparison with, for example, Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Germinal by Emile Zola and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. 

When Bennett wrote it, he was heavily influenced by the school of 'realism' professed by Zola.

The situation of the miser and his daughter seems derived from Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, which was published in 1833. 

In terms of socialist fiction, the obvious comparison is with H G Wells, not as a science fiction writer, but as the writer of Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) and Kipps (1905) which were published at around the same time as 'Anna ...' but seem rather less formal in style, less Victorian, more modern.

Once one has drudged through the first chapter, the pacing picks up. There are two triggers: firstly, in the first chapter when there are the first hints of a romantic relationship between Anna and Henry, but principally in the third chapter when Anna receives her inheritance and all the moral responsibilities that go with it. The first quarter ends with a revivalist prayer meeting in which Anna resists being converted. The mid-point is the School Treat, presided over by Mr Price, who has to leave the event suddenly; it is the last time we meet him. Henry's long-expected proposal is at the 75% mark. The final twist comes in the very last lines.

Selected quotes:

• "Her mind, stimulated by the emotions of the afternoon, broke the fetters of habitual self-discipline, and ranged voluptuously free over the whole field of recollection and anticipation. To remember, to hope: that was sufficient joy." (Ch 1)
• "It was Ephraim Tellwright who reduced the cost per head of souls saved." (Ch 2)
• "She had never looked beyond the horizons of her present world, but had sought spiritual satisfaction in the ideas of duty and sacrifice. ... she had rather despised love and the dalliance of the sexes. ... Now she saw, in a quick revelation, that it was the lovers, and not she, who had the right to scorn. She saw how miserably narrow, tepid and trickling the stream of her life had been ... Now it gushed forth warm, impetuous and full, opening out new and delicious vistas." (Ch 2)
• "On the grey distempered walls hung a few Biblical cartoons depicting scenes in the life of Joseph and his brethren - but without reference to Potiphar's wife." (Ch 4)
• "Blessed are the meek, blessed are the failures, blessed are the stupid, for they, unknown to themselves, have a grace which is denied to the haughty, the successful, and the wise." (Ch 6)
• "She was lovable, but had never been loved. She would have made an admirable wife and mother, but fate had decided that this material was to be wasted." (Ch 7)
• "The mysterious begetting of money by money ... The elaborate mechanism by which capital yields interest without suffering diminution from its original bulk is one of the commonest phenomena of modern life, and one of the least understood. ... to Anna ... the arrival of moneys out of space, unearned, unasked, was a disturbing experience, affecting her as a conjuring trick affects a child, whose sensations hesitate between pleasure and apprehension." (Ch 8)
• "The blunger crushed the clay, the sifter extracted the iron from it by means of a magnet, the press expelled the water, and the pug-mill expelled the air." (Ch 8)
• "He belonged to the great and powerful class of house-tyrants, the backbone of the British nation, whose views on income-tax  cause ministries to tremble." (Ch 9)
• "Anna tried to be at ease, but she was not. She could not for a long time dismiss the suspicion that all these people were foolishly blind to a peril which she alone had the sagacity to perceive." (Ch 10)
• "Anna had noticed that in families the youngest, petted in childhood, was often sacrificed in maturity. It was the last maid who must keep her maidenhood, and, vicariously filial, pay out of her own life the debt of all the rest." (Ch 11)
• "She had fraternized with sinners, like Christ; and, with amazing injustice, she was capable of deeming Mynors a Pharisee because she could not find fault with him." (Ch 11)
• "It's a sign of a hard winter ... when the hay runs after the horse." (Ch 12)
• "After fifty years of ceaseless labour, she had gained the affection of one person, and enough money to pay for her own funeral." (Ch 12)
• "She had sucked in with her mother's milk the profound truth that woman's life is always a renunciation." (Ch 13)

Some words I had to look up:

• erysipelas = a form of cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection which could have fatal consequences in the days before antibiotics.
• eleemosynary = charitable
• shardrucks; A 'shord' is a a faulty piece of pottery, and a 'ruck' is a rubbish tip.
• saggar: a box or container which can have a variety of shapes whose purpose is to protect the pottery from excessive heat during firing
• pug-mill: a machine containing rotating knives in a metal barrel to chop up the clay and force it through a grid into a vacuum chamber
• blunger: a mixer and blender to mix clay and water to ensure homogeneity
• peddling = small, paltry, petty. Presumably it comes from the fact that peddlers sold small goods. This word is nowadays pronounced and spelt 'piddling'.

January 2024; 245 pages

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

"The Middlesteins" by Jami Attenberg

Attenberg's third novel, this was one of the ten best-selling books on Amazon in 2012; it also made the New York Times best-seller list.

It centres around Edie, a grossly obese Jewish-American woman living in Chicago but it is mostly told from the perspective of those around her: her husband who leaves her, triggering shock waves across the family, her son and daughter, her daughter-in-law who puts her own family on a strict diet, and other members of the community. In general, the women are strong-minded and determined and the men are weak and compliant, which could be regarded as stereotypical, but most of the characters are well-drawn and convincing, especially the husband, the daughter, the daughter-in-law and the grand-daughter. 

It is refreshing to read a book focused on the characters and the relationships. There is a timeline along which the story develops but the story isn't driven by a plot. This is a portrait of normal, everyday life. That's not to say that nothing happens; rather, the things that happen are part of everyday lives. The drama and the tension comes from the ordinary things that happen to all of us, from the strengths and weaknesses of the characters, and from their interactions. Although I wasn't racing through the pages, desperate to know what happened, this quiet, gentle story had more than enough to grab and hold my interest. After all, it was about day-to-day life, the mundane stuff that I and every other reader experiences all the time. I couldn't help but empathise and identify with at least some of the characters, and recognise the others. This is a book about my own experiences, my strengths, my weaknesses, my hopes and my hidden despairs.

It was enlivened with terse prose that went straight to the point, witty prose that often sparkled and sometimes made me laugh aloud, prose that could capture a description or make an original observation in a few perfectly-chosen words.

It is told from multiple, third-person perspectives in the past-tense but allowing the author to make comments, such as fast-forwarding to tell the reader what will happen in the future to that character.

Selected quotes:

• "A child should be squeezable. She was a cement block of flesh." (Edie, 62 pounds)
• "After they made love, she would lazily watch the skin that covered his heart bob up and down, fast, slower, slow." (Edie, 62 pounds)
• "They agreed that food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything they desired." (Edie, 62 pounds)
• "She ... had grown up in a town of drunks, fighting her way to the middle class while the rest of the roommates did nothing but hover there." (The Meanest Act)
• "She had no poker face. All day long she flinched."  (The Meanest Act)
• "Real adults left their homes and went somewhere to work."  (The Meanest Act)
• "She was in three book clubs but she only showed up if she liked the book they were reading." (Edie, 202 pounds)
• "His wife had made all household decisions since the day they'd married, crushing him like a nut when he offered the slightest opinion." (Middlestein in Exile)
• "With grace he offered her his love and protection, and she accepted it, tepidly, warily. It did not bring them closer together, but it did not tear them apart." (Edie, 332 pounds)
• "If her mother could adjust the color of the sky to match her own eyes, she would." (The Walking Wounded)
• "Once you really know how the world works, you can't unknow it." (The Walking Wounded)
• "Emily made a bitchy little noise, a noise she had only recently started practicing and one that would get much, much better with age." (The Walking Wounded)
• "He was pretty sure he had not failed at anything in his life, even if he hadn't really succeeded at that much either." (Middlestein in Love) Doesn't that sum up life for 99% of us?

January 2024; 272 pages

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

"Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare

 

A sort of mixture between history and tragedy, whose real hero is not the eponymous Julius but Brutus, the moral man destroyed by his ideals. 

The play revolves around one of the best-recorded events in classical antiquity: the assassination of Julius Caesar which signalled the end of the Roman Republic and began the transition towards Empire. 

The background to the play, which would have been well-known to educated people of the time, is that the Roman Republic was founded after Lucius Junius Brutus overthrew King Tarquin the Proud; the fundamental ethos of the Republic is to distribute power so as to avoid a monarchy; any suggestion of king-making is anathema to the Roman citizens.

So when, in Act One, Caesar, who is the effective ruler of Rome following his defeat of Pompey the Great during civil war, is offered a crown, Marcus Junius Brutus, descendant of the earlier Brutus, is profoundly disturbed. Even though Caesar three times rejects the crown, Brutus believes that Caesar would like to be King. Cassius, a senator who had previously supported Pompey, uses this to persuade Brutus to join a group of conspirators who plan to assassinate Caesar. Cassius needs the support of Brutus so that the Roman citizens, recognising Brutus as a moral idealist, will believe that the motive of the assassins is to liberate Rome from tyranny, rather than just to facilitate regime change.

In Act Two there are repeated references to portents in the weather and unusual occurrences. Caesar's wife has an ominous dream. A soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the ides of March. Brutus has to make a decision: Caesar is one of his best friends but may prove a threat to the Republic. Caesar himself is indecisive, oscillating between the warnings, which frighten him, and his public persona which has to be one of fearlessness. But the conspirators manage to persuade him to go to the Capitol.

The assassination occurs in Act Three. Brutus then speaks to the Roman people and convinces them that killing Caesar was for the public good. But Brutus, idealistically impractical and against the advice of the politically astute Cassius, then allows Caesar's ally, Marc Antony, to speak at Caesar's funeral. This speech, a classic of oratory, making much use of irony in its repeated references to the "honourable" Brutus, turns the crowd against the assassins. It is the midpoint and the principal turning-point of the play. 

Act 4 sees Antony plotting with Octavius, Caesar's nephew, to assassinate their political rivals and to defraud the Roman citizens and to pin the blame on Lepidus, the third member of their triumvirate. The contrast between Antony's high-minded rhetoric at the funeral and this cynical opportunism is immediate. The next scene shows Cassius and Brutus falling out (Brutus, ever the idealist, accuses Cassius of self-interest while at the same time asking him to provide the money that Brutus needs to pay for troops because Brutus himself can't stoop to base means of raising cash). They need one another, however, too much and so they reconcile, deciding to do battle with Antony and Octavius at Philippi (another bad decision made by Brutus). 

Act 5 is the battle. Cassius and Brutus are defeated and commit suicide. Antony calls Brutus "the noblest Roman of them all".

There are four main characters. Brutus is the tragic hero, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons (this was a very renaissance view of Brutus; in the middle ages Brutus was seen as a man who betrayed his friend, a traitor nearly as bad as Judas, consigned to the lowest level of the Inferno by Dante). Cassius acts as the tempter, almost a devil, who works on Brutus much as Iago works on Othello. The antagonist is, in the first half of the play, Caesar, though scarcely glimpsed in the first act, who is ambiguously portrayed both as the ambitious wannabe monarch feared by Brutus and as a frail human. Upon Caesar's death, Marc Antony takes over as a much more cynical and dangerous opponent. 

Themes:

Brutus, the virtuous murderer

In many ways, this play is a tragedy and the tragic hero is Brutus, whose fundamental flaw is his idealism. Cassius and the conspirators recognise that they need Brutus on their side to give the assassination of Caesar the appearance of something that is honourable (the word repeatedly mocked by Mark Antony) so that they can gain the support of the Roman people. But recruiting Brutus means that they are saddled with his impractical idealism which leads him to make mistake after mistake. They recognise that Mark Antony might prove dangerous and propose murdering him as well, but Brutus won't let them. Instead, disastrously, he lets Mark Antony speak at Caesar's funeral. Later it is the hypocritical idealism of Brutus that fuels his fight with Cassius when he reproaches Cassius for failing to provide him with cash for his troops while telling Cassius that it won’t do for a Brutus to be sullied with extracting taxes from the peasantry.

Brutus is saddled with the reputation of his glorious ancestor who gave birth to the Republic of Rome after sending the last of their kings into exile. Brutus believes, or is manipulated into believing, that Caesar seeks to become king and that it is an act of virtue to prevent this. His naive idealism is displayed when he tries to divorce the act of murder from its reality. "Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,/ Not hew him as a carcase fit for hounds." he says in Act 2 Scene 1 (173 - 4), trying to pretend to himself that an act of butchery can be reinterpreted in religious terms. This is more hypocrisy. 

But perhaps his greatest moral failing is that he doesn't condemn his friend Caesar for what he is but for what he might become. Caesar has rejected a crown three times but Brutus believes that Caesar wants to be king. And that "might change his nature" (2.1.13). Brutus tells himself that must think of Caesar "as a serpent’s egg/ Which hatch’d, would, as his kind grow mischievous;/ And kill him in the shell." (2.1.32 - 34) It's a preemptive strike. 

There's more hypocrisy on display within this same speech. Brutus, seeking justifications for killing his friend, muses that"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins/ Remorse from power" (2.1.18-19). He admits that he's never seen this in Caesar ... yet. But the irony is that Brutus himself is planning murder, which is an act of power thoroughly disjoined from remorse.

I suppose it was quite a testament to the renaissance rehabilitation of Brutus for him to appear as a hero at all. In Dante, Brutus is consigned to the lowest level of hell, as a traitor, on a par with Judas.

Selected quotes:

• "I was born as free as Caesar" (1.2.97)
• "this man/ Is now become a god; and Cassius is/ A wretched creature, and must bend his body,/ If Caesar carelessly but nod on him." (1.2.115 - 118)
  "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/ Like a Colossus, and we petty men/ Walk under his huge legs, and peep about/ To find ourselves dishonourable graves." (1.2.134 - 137)
• "Men at some time are masters of their fates:/ The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings." (1.2.138 - 140) What's particularly nice about this is the way that Brutus semi-quotes this back to Cassius in act 4 scene 3 when he talks about the "tide in the affairs of men".
• "Let me have men about me that are fat,/ Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights:/ Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/ He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." (1.2.191-195) One of my father's favourite quotes; he was always a slender man!
• "He reads much." (1.2.200)Another reason for Caesar to be suspicious of Cassius!
• "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/ And the first motion, all the interim is/ Like a phantasma or a hideous dream." (2.1.64 - 66)
• "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32)
• "When love begins to sicken and decay,/ It useth an enforced ceremony." (4.2.20 - 21)
• "There is a tide in the affairs of men,/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/ Omitted, all the voyage of their life/ Is bound in shallows and in miseries." (4.3.216 - 219) More irony: Brutus is about to make yet another error.

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.

I saw JC in a superb RSC production at Stratford in March 2017. I was in the front row of the stalls! At one point, Brutus, who was reading a letter, handed it to me; not knowing what to do I nodded wisely and returned it. My wife enjoyed it particularly because Cassius not only had "a lean and hungry look" but also an impressive six-pack and was topless for a large part of the time.

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

"Sea of Tranquillity" by Emily St John Mandel

 Strange happenings suggest that what we perceive as reality, including ourselves, might be a simulation. So the Time Institute sends a time traveller to investigate. 

As is usual with this sort of fiction, it is more interesting when the reader is still in the dark as to what has happened: monsters are always scarier before they are seen. But there are several appealing characters and the plot has a clever twist towards the end.

Mandel is best known for Station Eleven, a novel set in a post-pandemic world, presciently written pre-Covid. (This book also involves a pandemic.) As with that book, the plot is somewhat contrived, with key questions unasked (such as, if we are in a simulation, who is writing the program? and why? and how can they cope with all that information? and are they in a simulation themselves?) but the characters are strong.

But I do wish that authors wouldn't write about authors. It seems like cheating. I know they say 'write what you know' but shouldn't you also write characters that resonate with your readers?

The first section is written in the present tense; the past tense is used in most of the other parts. A first-person narrative is used for Gaspery's sections; otherwise the narratives are third-person but written from the perspective of the principal character.

It was a pleasant and easy read but I doubt it will linger in my mind.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin." (Remittance: 4)
• "This place is utterly neutral on whether he lives or dies." (Remittance: 7)
• "A man who works long hours can hide anything." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Mirella wore a great deal of make-up at work, and when she was tired in the afternoons, sometimes her face felt heavy." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Sometimes order can be relentless." (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "What is time travel if not a security problem?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Doesn't everything seem obvious in retrospect?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Won't most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of others?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "The traveller's presence itself is a disruption." (Bad Chickens: 7)
• "As a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world." (Last Book Tour on Earth: reprise)
• "His heart flapped deathlessly." (Remittance 1918, 1990, 2008)

December 2023; 255 pages

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

"To Paradise" by Hanya Yanagihara

This is a big book divided into three parts, of which the second and third are further subdivided.

The first book seems to be a not particularly original reconsideration of the tension between love and duty. Set in 1894, in an alternative history of New York, centre of a breakaway republic in which gay marriage is the rule rather than the exception, gently, drifting David Bingham, a scion of a powerful banking family, must choose between an arranged marriage with an older man and a love affair with a penniless music teacher who might well be intending to rip him off. Spoiler alert: there is no resolution, the reader will never find out what happens in the end.

The first book is entitled 'Washington Square' and the tension between the husband the paterfamilias wants the child to marry, and the child's own choice of a potential wastrel is very similar to the central tension in the Henry James book of the same name. 

The second book, set in 1994, tells the story of another David Bingham, the kept lover of powerful lawyer Charles Griffith. David would have been heir to the throne of Hawaii if history had been different and the second half of this book is a long letter (written, in secret, by a man who is apparently blind and almost too weak to leave his bed) from his father explaining how he, the dad, was persuaded by another Edward to leave his home and live in the wilderness. Once again, we never find out what happens to the principal characters.

The third book, comprising the second 50% of the novel, alternates between letters written by Charles, a scientist living in 2043 and later, as he describes having to make difficult choices, restricting personal freedoms in a society swept by repeated pandemics, and his granddaughter Charlie, living in a totalitarian regime in New York of the 2090s, mentally and physically scarred by disease, offered an opportunity to escape (but once again we will never learn if she succeeds).

Besides the obvious themes of homosexuality and the response of society to pandemics, each of these three stories has a weak and gentle character, cared for by a more powerful man, forced to decide between being safe and looked after, and risking everything for freedom. 

This is a long novel and I repeatedly questioned whether it was worth the effort of reading. The three stories are linked by devices such as the repeated names and the Washington Square location, and by the themes. But I found this somewhat artificial and irritating, and the lack of resolution of any story irritated me even more. There were also moments of high artificiality, such as the PI report in the first book and the father's letter in the second. There were moments when dinner-table  discussions sounded like dissertations, and when it was implicitly assumed that modern-day mores would survive into the future. Time and again my ability to suspend my disbelief, surely important in a novel rooted in alternative history and dystopian scifi,  was challenged. I got the feeling the Yanagahira was playing with form rather than concentrating on writing a novel that might appeal to the reader. 

Nevertheless, there are brilliant characters, drawn so that the reader really believes in them, and the tensions between what will keep them safe and what might offer them fulfilment are carefully explored and genuinely involve the reader in the dilemmas faced by the characters: should David in book one believe Edward (no!), should Charlie in book three believe David (yes) and attempt to flee (not sure). etc? Book Two was the weakest in this respect: more and more I cared less and less. 

On the other hand, it sometimes felt that, as with her previous novel A Little Life, Yanagihara's character are drawn from a tiny subsection of humanity. Although the principals (David, David and Charlie) are gentle, weak, powerless characters, they are all privileged being born into either rich or royal or powerful families. And their milieu is equally drawn from the higher echelons of society: rich and powerful and cultured. Almost everyone is handsome. Their challenges are the challenges of the lucky. Does Yanagihara not know any ordinary folk?

There are moments of perfect description and other moments when Yanagihara can succinctly nail aspects of the human condition. But fundamentally I was alienated by the formal tricks, by the first world problems, by the lack of resolution and by the sheer bulk of the book. 

Selected quotes:

Moments of perfect description:

• "The man’s head was tipped back on his neck, which was long but supple and strong, like a snake, and as he sang, David watched a muscle move in his throat, a pearl traveling upward and then sliding down" ((Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "Around him, the world was impossibly vivid: the sky assaultively blue, the birds oppressively loud, the smell of horse manure, even in the cold, unpleasantly strong." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "they seemed made not from flesh but from something silty and cold. Not marble, but chalk." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "on the wall opposite, a square of light flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, like a code meant only for me." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 4)
• "what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 6)

Other great passages:

• "He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion." (Book 1, Washington Square, 2)
• "He was a bite of an apple, but Edward Bishop was that apple baked into a pie with a shattery, lardy crust pattered with sugar, and after a taste of that, there was no going back to the other." (Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "his leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "What would it be like to be someone anonymous, someone whose name meant nothing, who was able to move through life as a shadow?" (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "His path was never his own to forge, for someone had already done it for him, clearing obstacles he would never know had once existed. He was free, but he was also not." ((Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1) A similar sentiment may be found in Washington Square by Henry James: "'Well, I never knew a foreigner!' said young Townsend, in a tone which seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional."
• "it sometimes felt as if he ... was an understudy, hurried onstage in the middle of a scene he couldn’t remember, trying to read his fellow actors’ cues, hopeful his lines would return to him." Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "he would listen in silence as they discussed things—people he had never heard of, books he had never read, movie stars he didn’t care about, events he hadn’t been alive for" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "But he was also aware of feeling like a child. Charles chose his clothes and where they would vacation and what they would eat" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "here was someone who allowed him to be the object of worry, never the worrier." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption;" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 2)
• "the government will do anything to delay confronting and correcting the actual problem: Americans’ scientific illiteracy." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 2)
• “'With every person you see, you should try to notice five things,' Grandfather would say when I was struggling to describe someone. “What race are they? Are they tall or short? Are they fat or thin? Do they move quickly or slowly? Do they look down or straight ahead?" ((Book 3, Zone Eight, part 3)
• “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all ... because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego. True selflessness ... meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left" (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "when you’re twenty-four, your body is for pleasure and you’re constantly in love." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)"
• "to the young, anything unpleasant can be blamed on or attributed to old age." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)

Some great moments, showing considerable authorial skill, but its flaws make it a chore to read.

Oh, and it's about personal freedoms in the face of a pandemic. Like so many other recent fiction. Ho hum.

December 2023; 792 pages

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

"Close to Home" by Michael Magee

 

Sean escaped from Belfast, going to Liverpool to study English Literature. Now he's back in an environment of hardship and hopelessness. He works in a dead-end job for low wages, lives rent-free in a building due to be demolished, steals from the supermarket, cheats taxi drivers and does what he must to get by. He also takes drugs and gets drunk to cope with the depressing bleakness of his life and his future. 

Then, during a party,  he assaults another young man and he is charged with assault. 

The story charts Sean's precarious life. He wants to be a writer but his encounters with the arty-farty student crowd leave him feeling alienated. Temptation is ever present: his friends encourage him to take drugs and, given his prospects, why wouldn't he? Why shouldn't he call in sick? And the aftermath of the Troubles, when terrorists and paramilitaries shot and bombed, is still around.

It's a bleak world and Sean's future seems gloomy. I empathised with him almost immediately and then spent a lot of this book hoping he would behave himself and fearing he wouldn't. There were so many opportunities for him to fail. This made it a powerfully absorbing but sometimes gruelling read.

Selected quotes:

• "Silences hung like curtains around her." (Ch 11)
• "Only a few years before,I had watched her trail Debbie Porter by the hair across the pavement and punch her over and over again until she screamed for Mairead to stop. Now she was smiling along to the poems being read by a woman who had translated Catullus." (Ch 12)
• "She was a vegan. At least, she ordered a vegan meal, and I didn't know why anybody would do that to themselves if they weren't." (Ch 20)
• "It was one of those hugs that asks a lot of the other person." (Ch 20)
• "That leathery look had aged him, and dyeing your hair will only take you so far when you look like a handbag." (Ch 21)

December 2023; 278 pages

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

"Country" by Michael Hughes

 A 2018 Book of the Year in the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The story is the story of the Iliad but transposed to Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles, just before the ceasefire. The Greeks become Republican gunmen seeking to disrupt the fragile ceasefire; Achilles is their famous sniper Achill (aka Liam O'Brien), Agamemnon is Pig, their commanding officer, his brither Dog is Menelaus, Sid is Odysseus, and old Ned is Nestor. The Trojans are the British, holed up in an army base (called Castle William but some vandals have torn down the W so it had become Illiam), with their various allies including the police and the local Orangemen, Hector is Henry, married to Anna, father of baby Max. Helen is Nellie, married to Dog, but now, having become an informer, she is living with Alex, nicknamed Paris. The Olympian Gods are the Higher-Ups, the untouchable politicians, who make decisions and dispose of men's lives.

It is remarkably faithful to the plot, even including the necessary long speeches and some of the Iliad's hideous descriptions of the effects of violence on the human body. But it works! Written using the contemporary Irish slang, translating meals into fry-ups, chariots into cars and even the funeral games of Patroclus into competitions held between men at a wake. This is a clever and even insightful version of a classic epic.

In fact it is better than that. Yes, part of the pleasure of reading lies in the ability to decrypt it. But its immersion in Irishness and Irishisms give it an utterly authentic feel. 

Selected quotes:

• "Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely." (Ch 1; first lines)
• "Told her if she couldn't decide, to just give each of them a number and roll a dice. ... He said you didn't have to do what the dice said, but how you felt when the number came up would show you what you really wanted." (Ch 10) I've advised students to do this in multiple-choice exam papers but not as a way of choosing a boyfriend.
• "She couldn't believe they had a bottle of wine on the table while they were eating. Not that they opened it." (Ch 16)
• "He gave her a wee smiley frown that said, You really don't need to call me sir. And she gave him a wee smiley frown back that said, Och I know, but sure old habits die hard after eight hundred years of oppression. Sir." (Ch 29)
• "Dog hated being wounded. All that sitting around. Fuck all to do. He always ended up thinking. And he really hated thinking." (Ch 34)
• "Thinking gets you nowhere in this game. ... Crack on with the job, and leave the brain-work to the higher-ups." (Ch 35)
• "But like any man who got to be the best at what he did, they promoted him off that job, and sat him in a wee office directing others who weren't half as good." (Ch 37)
• "Death looks like glory to a young man. Get a few more years on you, and glory starts looking a lot like death." (Ch 47)
• "Back at the Ships, Ned was in full flow. He'd seen the like before, many's and many's the time. He'd heard all the pros and cons for and the pros and cons against." (Ch 49)
• "Of all the operations you set in motion, you were lucky if one out of fifty made the news. Most people never appreciated it was hard fucking work. Tedious. Frustrating. Soul-destroying." (Ch 50)
• "You don't listen to what a man says. You watch what he does, and you know who he is." (Ch 58)

Not only is it clever, not only is it well-written, but its transposition  into such a visceral context provides a fresh perspective on the original. Spell-binding.

December 2023; 314 pages

Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

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

"Great Circle" by Maggie Shipstead

Photo by Keven Rutherford //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cape_Cod_biplane.JPG

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction

Two interleaved narratives tell the birth-to-death bildungsroman of Marian Graves (and her twin brother Jamie, and her childhood friend Caleb Bitterroot), a young American girl who loved flying and disappeared on an attempt to fly around the world, over the two poles, in 1950, and the current story of the wild child actress who plays her in the biopic. It's a big book, full of incident and humour and packed with details that create such a sense of authenticity that I googled Marian to see if she was a real person. 

I was captivated by the story of Marian and her brother and Caleb; when they were in peril, my heart was in my mouth. I was enthralled by them. And the counterpoint story brought humour and lightness to the book.

Enormously readable and great fun.

One tiny quibble. I don't think rugby was played at Eton in the 1940s.

Selected quotes: (pages refer to the 2022  paperback published by Penguin in the UK)

• "Water was always on its way somewhere bigger." (p 51)
• "White water was shouldering at the bumper the way Wallace did when his Cadillac got stuck in the mud." (p 52)
• "I reeled like a charred and tottering cartoon knight who'd just been flambeed in dragon's breath." (p 184)
• "box-hedge eyebrows" (p 188)
• "There are always a bunch of these rich kids floating around LA, riding on fortunes they didn't earn as though on litters born aloft by the ghosts of their ancestors." (p 191)
• "I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory." (p 319)
• "Different moods sweep through her gaze the same way the leaf shadows blow across the floor." (p 382)
• "The Days were wearing dress shirts and chinos so tightly tailored they looked like superheroes' unitards." (p 387)
• "Knowing what you don't want is just as useful as knowing what you do." (p 392)
• "Muskoxen wander past her outhouse, ancient-seeming creatures, haloed by their own frozen breath, their thick coats swinging around their ankles like monks' robes." (p 394)
• "The Bellanca gets wrecked and patched so many times it's a jumble of spare parts flying in formation." (p 395)
• "Both of us aiming our words in the same direction like we were driving down a road somewhere." (p 419)
• "So many years up in the north trying to freeze her heart solid and let the wind erode it down to nothing." (p 482)
• "He'd been present for every minute, every second of his own life, and he hadn't known himself." (p 544)
• "Time stopped and started again, stuttered as though it were yet another machine running out of fuel." (p 556)
• "Theater actors play multiple parts both to save money and to show off." (p 557)
• "We don't always notice beginnings. Endings are usually easier to detect." (p 558)
• "Almost no-one has more than a few scattered data points, but they connect the dots however they please." (p 571)
• "She understands now this place, vast and lifeless, might as well be death itself." (p 627)
• "Where is the border between life and oblivion? Why should anyone presume to recognize it." (p 629)

December 2023; 670 pages

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