Category Archives: Books

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Posted on by
Reply

I sometimes scold myself for never reading modern novels, so I went in the shallow end with this modern novel based on “David Copperfield”. I was immediately immersed in it – perhaps partly because it’s set in a world as alien to me as Victorian Suffolk and Canterbury: Lee County, Virginia (I had to look for it on a map). And, after reading so much Jean Rhys, it was exhilarating to read a writer who wrote with such a different narrative voice.

It’s a fascinating reworking of Dickens, with that same sense of a child’s sufferings lasting throughout his life. One big difference is where the source of the world’s iniquities is located. Dickens had the usual Victorian morals, although more generous than some. In later novels he also saw institutions as complicit in causing suffering, but morality is largely down to individuals keeping to the right path. Kingsolver has a more modern interpretation based on social and economic circumstances: the wrecked lives of her opioid-addicted characters are inextricably linked to the exploitation of land and labour by the powerful, and the cynical pushing of painkillers to people who have no choice but to work themselves to a standstill is the cause of their addictions. (This theme was hammered a bit; she resembles Dickens in having a few skippable sections.) Thankfully she ditches Dickens’s over-ripe sentimentality – thus Demon is alive to his mother’s shortcomings – but retains the sympathy and compassion:

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children.

This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the tooth-brushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

Jean Rhys

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve had a blitz on Jean Rhys. Not “Wild Sargasso Sea” but her collected short stories and her interwar novels: “Quartet”, “After Leaving Mr Mackenzie” and “Good Morning, Midnight”. It was reading Ford Madox Ford that prompted me.

The narrative voice in the novels doesn’t vary much and really does qualify for its own term, “Rhysian”. Despite ranging from the Caribbean to Vienna via Paris and London (Tottenham Court Road is a landmark), her world is quite small. Even Jane Austen’s “little piece of ivory” exceeds Rhys’s. She’s very insightful on being English but (having grown up in Dominica) not being seen as English by the English. She is an eternal, rejected outsider. The events of these stories – or a version of them – largely happened to Rhys, but the narratives are viewed through an increasing detached authorial lens. A woman – or, rather, three separate women – moves further and further into a spiral of drink, grotty hotel rooms and men to support her.

With decreasing success. I highlighted all of this passage just to remember the flavour of her stark prose.

We cross the road unsteadily and stand under a sickly town-tree waiting to signal a taxi. I start to giggle. He runs his hand up and down my arm.

I say: ‘Do you know what’s really the matter with me? I’m hungry. I’ve had hardly anything to eat for three weeks.’

‘Comment?’ he says, snatching his hand. ‘What’s this you’re relating?’

‘C’est vrai,’ I say, giggling still more loudly. ‘It’s quite true. I’ve had nothing to eat for three weeks.’ (Exaggerating, as usual.)

At this moment a taxi draws up. Without a word he gets into it, bangs the door and drives off, leaving me standing there on the pavement.

And did I mind? Not at all, not at all. If you think I minded, then you’ve never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets. Close-up of human nature – isn’t it worth something?

l expect that man thought Fate was conspiring against him – what with his girl’s shoes and me wanting food. But there you are, if you’re determined to get people on the cheap, you shouldn’t be so surprised when they pitch you their own little story of misery sometimes.

*

In the middle of the night you wake up. You start to cry. What’s happening to me? Oh, my life, oh, my youth . . .

There’s some wine left in the bottle. You drink it. The clock ticks. Sleep . . .

That’s fairly typical, I think. Downbeat, sordid, melancholy, cynical – but so fascinating. Vulnerable and razor-sharp at the same time: you wonder how long it took – and how many tears were shed – for Rhys to hone that edge.

And now I want to go to Paris (and think of Tottenham Court Road while walking down the rue de Rennes)!

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)

Posted on by
1

An unsettling, serpentine narrative from the first paragraph:

My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.

One minute their friendship is a stately minuet, the next a hellish prison. As a reader, you really don’t know where to perch yourself in this novel. It made me think of those paintings by James Ensor or Edvard Munch that see disturbing things behind conventional façades. (The cover of my book is a painting by August Macke.) Repression seeps everywhere. There are descriptions that made me think of Seurat (discrete experiences that don’t join up but form a whole) and Van Gogh (a hyper-real train journey on the day of Maisie Maidan’s death). The narrative is chopped up and re-arranged non-chronologically – a readable Dadaist text.

Which makes me wonder about the reader’s share in this novel. We are all such sophisticated readers nowadays! My notes in the first chapters are all about the questionability of what I am being told by the narrator. I do my faux-Freud and my post-Gide interpretations and wonder how contemporary readers read the novel. Perhaps the same as I; after all, modernism was fairly old hat by 1915, Jane Austen was pretty adept at shifting points of view and in Lucy Snowe Charlotte Brontë created a very buttoned-up narrator (narratrix?).

The first person narrator, Dowell – unreliable? naive? manipulative? – is the male half of a rich American couple in Europe. They meet an English couple – the Ashburnhams – at a German spa and form a close friendship over the course of their many annual visits there. The American wife and the English husband have “hearts” – seemingly defective organs that require constant attendance. Symbols and prolepsis abound. The account is written after the deaths of both and in such a way that the reader pieces together the past history partly in the same way as the narrator does. (Or so it seems.)

Names: Ashburnham. Very solid and British (“By oak and ash and thorn, good sirs . . .”) Dowell: a little piece of wood to pin things together.

So: Florence and Dowell have been married for 12 years; he believes she has a weak heart and must have no excitement (so no consummation of the marriage). Ashburnham and Leonora are the perfect couple: they are “just good people! How the devil – how the devil do they do it?” Of course, nothing is at it seems. I thought of Claudius discovering the truth about Messalina and Othello being duped by Iago.

So much of interest in this book. Dowell using his narrative as a kind of creative self-discovery/self-analysis; at one point he says “I had really forgotten about that exclamation of Florence’s until this moment”. But how aware is he? How transparent a narrator? How stupid a man? By the end I wondered if I should see him more as a blood-sucking parasite and thought of the final scenes of Saltburn – for the reality is that Dowell ends the novel living in Ashburnham’s old home, the carer of the young woman that Ashburnham loved, and he did nothing when he saw that Ashburnham was going to kill himself. (Perhaps he could even have saved Florence if he wished.) He insists throughout that he loved Ashburnham – an emotion that doesn’t change, even as he alters his views on the two wives. And yet . . . and yet . . . Dowell is aware of a changing, fragmenting self as he writes: alone of the quartet, he has to revise his understanding of the previous 12 years, acknowledge his ignorance and come to terms with the changed landscape of his former life. How is one to think of it?

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

Leonora’s Roman Catholicism. Is it Dowell’s attitude alone that makes him so politely hostile to it or does it mirror the author’s? The tone recalled Lucy Snowe’s extreme sniffiness at the Villette Catholics, even though she loved one of them.

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson (1938)

Posted on by
Reply

Well, that was fun. A relief to have something so frivolous about a woman’s life to turn to! It’s Cinderella all over again, combined with a puncturing – or, more accurately, a ripping to shreds – of conventional moral values. Miss Pettigrew is forty, downtrodden, friendless and on the verge of destitution when she encounters Delysia LaFosse. Even better, it doesn’t all end on the stroke of midnight.

Complete froth, but enjoyable, readable froth – with the authentic 1930s mindset about the superiority of the true Englishman (ironically, built like the Greek Hercules and with the face of the American Clark Gable) over the handsome, friendly, charming not-quite-a-gentleman Phil, disqualified from marrying the delicious Delysia-who-can’t-say-no because “somewhere in his ancestry there has been a Jew”. Ouch. Narrow conventions can be swept aside in the matter of morals . . . but not ancestry.

The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary (1944)

Posted on by
Reply

Well, I finally finished it – sometimes devouring it, sometimes picking at it. It’s a brilliant and repellent novel: the world seen through the eyes and thoughts of Gulley Jimson, a lying, thieving artist not averse to a bit of GBH. (I’m tempted to re-read “Herself Surprised” just to hear Sara’s voice.) He sees the world as a vast canvas for his brush: the opening scene where he paints with words the sun “like an orange in a fried fish shop” is just the start. Something exotic and startling in a mundane world. Nothing is unnoticed in Jimson’s world, just like Blake’s – whose long quotations I skimmed over unapologetically. Jimson + Blake = indigestion for this reader.

But the mass pile-up of words and images and thoughts and emotions (many of them fairly basic) grip and repulse you. There’s something about Jimson’s zest for life – and for re-creating that life on canvas (or on a soon-to-be-demolished wall) – that captures you and makes you feel like a purse-lipped killjoy for recollecting that the “tap” that broke Sara’s nose is actually called domestic violence these days, or that handing over pawn tickets to someone for the items of his that you’ve hocked is actually theft.

Dorothy Whipple

Posted on by
1

I’ve just come through a brief Dorothy Whipple phase. Only two of her books so far, but it’s nice to know that she is there in the wings if I’m ever stuck for something to download. Another interwar author (I can’t get away from them) but this time with a focus on the North and the Midlands. Very readable, with plenty to interest and keep me thinking. It chimed with Lucy Malleson’s autobiography: a sense of cheerfulness and modesty that keeps one grounded without being walked over, and always the spectre of real poverty in the background.

High Wages (1930)

Set in a northern town before, during and after WWI. A young woman, alone in the world and having to make her own living, is taken on in a classy draper’s shop and works her way up to her own shop selling ready-made clothes. Whipple has a warm, engaging way of writing that is nonetheless sometimes a little flat-footed and sometimes too contrived. The first page, for instance, when the reader is introduced to Jane . . . and risks confusing her with basil fotherington-tomas:

The whole expanse of heaven was covered with minute clouds, little abrupt things, kicking up their heels, flying off into nothing. They were so madly inconsequent that Jane laughed. And then, as if someone had said to them, ‘Come now! Quietly! Quietly!’ they stopped rioting and settled down together in the rosy glow. They were merged and gradually were lost to sight. A majestic gold arose and suffused the sky, leaving a pool of green in the east.

but it gives you an idea of Jane’s spirit – and, fortunately for her future wellbeing, her idealism is tempered with common sense and an eye for what is fashionable and becoming.

The novel is focussed on the female perspective of the world; a narrow place where choosing fabrics and clothes is a pleasurable escape. The war happens offstage; Jane’s concern is her tiny new shop. The plot, such as it is, is unremarkable; it’s the sense of lived life that is the novel’s great strength, particularly when seen through Jane’s eyes. It’s also very good on the accommodations we must make with real life: having to put up with an employer’s miserliness; overcoming distaste at a co-worker’s habits and focussing on her friendliness; the courage required to step outside your preordained sphere.

The Priory (1939)

A family living in a country house, once a priory, beyond their means, all equally self-absorbed. Into this stagnant life the Major drops a little pebble – a new wife – in the hope of having a household better run than his sister can manage, and the ripples spread far and wide. I thought of it as a novel about imperfect marriages – one where, on the eve of war, various couples fight their own little battles until they arrive at some kind of armistice.

Once again, Whipple is good at ambivalence. Nurse Pye is a monster when she discovers Bessy’s pregnancy but a ministering angel when Christine’s baby has pneumonia. Anthea, the new wife, is really quite a sympathetic character but seems unsympathetic as she gradually eases out each limpet from the house. That’s the best of shifting free indirect speech: the reader has an insight into the feelings and motivations of each character.

There’s a sly amusement in some of the lines and a sense of seriousness in others. Anthea on her enduring quest for happiness:

She remembered a phrase from one of her old books on happiness, in which the necessity for effort was dwelt upon. “Everything worth while,’ said Nietzsche, ‘is accomplished notwithstanding.’ Anthea acknowledged it; notwithstanding [her husband], it was in her case.

Christine’s thoughts on the place of her family’s home and grounds:

She saw for the first time that the history of Saunby was a sad one. It had been diverted from its purpose; it had been narrowed from a great purpose to a little one. It had been built for the service of God and the people; all people, but especially the poor.

‘And now it serves only us,’ she thought.

In the old days, the people from all the villages round about had come to Saunby for help and advice. They had brought their sick and their children. They had come up the avenue and down the drive and the back drive and in at the side from Byford and Munningham. Travellers had broken their journeys at Saunby, and pilgrims rested on their way from the north to Canterbury and on their way back.

It’s the kind of run-down country estate that, post-war, might have been bought and turned into council houses, a school, a surgery and a little parade of shops – a mid-20th-century version of the community that the Priory once offered. As it is, the novel ends with a plan to make Saunby into a privately owned community offering home and work – a rather bolted-on happy ending that was probably what readers wanted in 1939.

But perhaps that was an improvement on the contemporary class-based way of helping people. There’s a bit of a broadside against Lady Bountifuls, those upper-class women who acted as unofficial social workers:

Penelope put down her chocolate cake. Now they should have it.

“You see, I don’t believe in what you are doing,” she said in her cool voice. “I don’t believe in playing with the poor.

“You’ve grown out of your dolls, so you take to the poor. The poor are an occupation for you. Getting up bazaars is fun for you. You haven’t any affairs of your own, so you go and interfere in the affairs of the poor. You go and visit them in their dreadful houses and portion out allowances for a little food and coal and clothing and then you come back to a home like this and eat a tea like this.”

Which is probably the kind of thing that Lucy Malleson was doing in Stepney. The more I read, the more I can see why the country was ready for some kind of socialism in 1945.

The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson (1959)

Posted on by
Reply

These days I have a Kindle with hundreds of books loaded onto it, and it always comes with me. In my younger days I took whatever books I could find – on youth hostel bookshelves, in small corners of second-hand bookshops where they sold foreign books, or by swapping with others. That’s why I once read a Jeffrey Archer book and why there are/were copies of “The Duchess of Malfi” (Montpellier – probably once a set text for students) and Montaigne’s Essays (Alexandria, I think) on the bookshelves.

Which is a long-winded way of explaining how I once read “Hadrian the Seventh” by Frederick Rolfe, puzzling at its weirdness on each page. I had no idea what to make of its arcane language, waspishness and Roman Catholicism.

That kind of serendipity has long been banished.

And so to my latest read, “a study of an artist’s paranoia”. It’s a clever, satirical novel about literary jousting and artistic skullduggery. Rolfe is partly the updated inspiration for the main character, Daniel Skipton – a repellent, vituperative, dishonest, sleazy, literary Mr Ripley stranded in Bruges, living in squalor and despising the rest of the world for not recognising his genius. He is still polishing his next novel, which he completed a year before, using a black pen for grammar, green for style and red for comment. It’s a slow process:

Daniel counted, the number of lines and the words in each line. Two hundred and forty words, roughly. A day’s work.

The book has plenty of such sly jokes; they keep you reading about such unlikeable characters through the prism of Skipton’s internal discourse. (At least I hope it’s meant to be Skipton’s; if it’s Hansford Johnson’s own style, she’s definitely off my list.)

Skipton turns on almost everyone, including those whose hand he is feeding from. He has a brilliant line in invective, whether written, spoken or thought.

She read to them, in the glutinous accents of self-love, imbecile verses engendered in the tripes and filtered through the clogged sieve of her mind, dropping finally on to the paper with such an irrelevant accretion of stale orts and rotting scraps that the tripes moved at the sight of them, thus bringing, in this meanest work of art as in the noblest, the end into holy fusion with the beginning.

It’s one of the strings that animates him. The other is an acute aesthetic sense which sends him to his window each evening to watch the sunset and anchors him to the beauty and spirit of Bruges. It’s his one sympathetic quality.