Book review

The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, 2024

In his summary of The Proof of My Innocence, Jonathan Coe tells us that ” I felt like writing something contemporary, ironic and harder-edged. I wanted to return, if possible, to the tone of What a Carve Up!, with some kind of metatextual crime story which would also reflect on the current political situation.” If we judge the novel by these criteria, then I think that while certainly the metatextual crime story box can definitely be ticked, I would struggle to describe this as ironic or harder-edged. I will try to explain why in this review, but the good news is that the lack of a hard-edge is not a serious problem nor does it detract from the overall enjoyability of the novel.

Coe’s well-established method is to use contemporary real-life political events as a backdrop to his stories. The Proof of My Innocence follows this pattern by being set in the tumultuous period of Liz Truss’s premiership in the autumn of 2022. It opens with her election and ends with her resignation just seven weeks later, the shortest term of office of a British Prime Minister by some considerable distance.

The novel opens with a woman detective following a suspect on a train. Just as she is about to arrest him she is interrupted by a See It Say It Sorted announcement. Being infuriated by these announcements and then making a plot point out of them, is the kind of thing an observational stand-up comedian might ‘notice’, and pretend to get worked up about, when they really aren’t that obtrusive. This scene is then swiftly followed by an apparently unrelated story-line in which Phyl, who has recently graduated from university, works in a minimum wage job at a sushi bar at Heathrow Airport. She lives with her parents and misses the freedom of university life. Phyl watches old episodes of Friends as a means of reducing the anxiety caused by the lack of direction in her post-graduate life. The friction between millennials and their Boomer parents is one of the sources of humour in the novel. Coe is unquestionably one of the latter and I am not sure his portrait of the younger generation is entirely accurate, but the Friends obsession (or insert comedy programme of your choice – another favourite is the US version of The Office) seemed spot on.

The arrival of a guest disrupts the family dynamic. Christopher Swann, a friend from her parents’ time at Cambridge University in the 80’s, writes a blog on contemporary political issues. He is planning on attending TruCon, a conference organised by a dubious right-wing group pressure group. The conference is being held at a nearby stately home, Wetherby Hall. Chris is joined by his adopted daughter, Rashida, who quickly bonds with Phyl over a shared frustrating experience with the lifts at terminal 5. Phyl is toying with the idea of writing a novel, and in discussion with Rashida about this idea she jots down three possible genres for her work: cosy crime, dark academia (such the The Secret History) and auto-fiction. The bulk of the remainder of the novel is written in the form of these three genres. The reader can’t immediately tell whether these are fictions written by Phyl or by Coe, although this is eventually revealed.

The cosy crime third of the story is set at Wetherby Hall, the venue for the TruCon conference, which opens on the day Liz Truss becomes prime minister. This section opens with a parody of this genre which is somewhat over the top:

“Christopher Swann carefully steered his car between the yellowing drystone walls of the quaint old bridge that carried the road over the brook….Just a few hundred yards after crossing the brook he entered the village of \Wetherby Pond itself. At the sound of his engine (even though he was driving a quiet, hybrid model) the ducks on the eponymous body of water took flight with a volley of complaining quacks. Christopher followed the road around the edge of the pond, his eyes taking in every unlikely detail of the old post office, the red telephone box standing outside the village shop, the row of trimly thatched cottages and an elderly resident reading a copy of the Times while sitting on a weathered oak bench.”

I genuinely can’t tell if this is deliberately bad genre writing or not, but I will give Coe the benefit of the doubt and assume it is part of the parody. I particularly liked the description of his Swann’s ‘eyes’ taking in every detail as if any other body part could have fulfilled the same function! Swann is treated as an outsider by most conference delegates, which of course he very much is. Rather than keeping a low profile he goes out of his way to antagonise the various right-wingers present, all of whom feel jubilant at Truss’s appointment, feeling this is their moment. The conference is interrupted by the news of Queen Elizabeth 2nd’s death, quickly followed by Christopher’s brutal murder. Coe is treading a fine line here – he is incorporating all the cosy crime tropes he can think of – the rural setting, a locked room mystery, secret passages, a cryptic note from the victim, etc etc – and at the same time telling the underlying story of Swann’s forty-year pursuit of the far right in the UK and their plans for the day they finally take power, which seems to have arrived.

The next section of the story is told as an example of the ‘dark academia’ genre and is based around a manuscript memoir of one of Swann’s friends at university in the 1980’s. This section continues the delicate balancing act between parody – the author’s memories of his days at Cambridge in the 80’s include love affairs, glamorous young women, hidden identities, secret societies and a sinister conspiracy to support the Thatcher Government – and advancing the narrative, leaving clues about the present-day mystery. The final section written as auto-fiction completes the murder mystery element of the novel but leaves some loose ends dangling. These are picked up in what is in effect the novel’s postscript, which reveals that much of the preceding story has been a fiction within the fiction – hence the sound of the metatextual box being ticked.

The Proof of My Innocence is full of things that the reader is encouraged to notice for themselves, the novelists equivalent of Easter eggs. Clues to the identify of the murder form part of these things we are encouraged to notice, but there’s much more – references to contemporary culture, running jokes (the laboured joke about whether an Cambridge don had a harpsichord or a clavichord in his rooms is repeated about a dozen times) wordplay, and so on. Each time we spot one of these we get a small hit of dopamine – ‘clever me!’ – that keeps us reading. And The Proof of My Innocence was eminently readable – I got through it in just over two days. By way of example, the murder mystery element of the story has the victim surviving his attack just long enough to write a few cryptic symbols before expiring (this trope goes back to at least A Study in Scarlet. The message is “r 8 / 2.” Is this a reference to someone staying in room 8 (2)? Or something happening on 8th February? Or possibly even something happening on 2nd August (those pesky Americans with their different conventions for writing dates). Or something else entirely? (Clue, it’s something else entirely). Earlier a pub Swann visits is called the Fresh Lettuce, a wry reference to the tabloid joke that haunted (haunts?) Truss as to whether her premiership would last longer than a lettuce (it didn’t). I was patting myself on the back when I spotted the fact that a plot point would revolve around a novel within the novel called My Innocence and changes made to the proof copy (hence, the Proof of My Innocence, a clever play on words). Is the enjoyment of these ‘noticeables’ a feature of the genres Coe parodies, or of his writing more generally?

Sadly, the novel slightly fizzles out. The big conspiracy Swann is planning to expose, the far-right’s plan to privatise the NHS, never sees the light of day. A memory stick with details of the plan is stolen and back up copies are quietly forgotten after his death. An alternative right-wing plan revealed within the 1980’s memoir, to defeat a strike by the NUM, is also forgotten (this was hardly a secret plan, more a statement of the obvious). Coe’s portrait of the far-right of British politics, and the extent to which it is influenced by the American right, is usually spot on, but the absence of any reference to Farage or Reform was puzzling. Wagstaff, a Tory politician who plays the role of villain in the novel, is the nearest we come to a portrait of Farage, but he is a Cambridge graduate and a life-long Tory, so not anywhere near an equivalent. Reform need the Jonathan Coe treatment. Once the meta-fictions end and the novel switches to the principal storyline we find out that the murder-mystery narratives were Phyl’s attempts at making sense of Swann’s death in a car crash before he even reached the conference. Not a particularly sensitive way of processing someone’s death I would have thought.

Coe is an author I have been meaning to read for some time. He is quite prolific having published 15 novels, roughly one every three years. His writing style is engaging and accessible. So I will definitely be reading more of his work in future. I enjoyed The Proof of My Innocence and look forward to reading Coe’s thoughts on Starmer’s Labour.

The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, 2024

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Book review

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford, 1951

England, 1939. Grace Allingham, a young, affluent Englishwoman is engaged to be married to Hughie. But when she meets Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, a French Air Force officer, she is swept off her feet, Hughie is dumped unceremoniously and Grace and Charles-Edouard quickly marry. After a brief honeymoon he returns to the war, leaving Grace pregnant but content to wait out the months and years of war for his return. Seven years pass, and when he finally returns to England it is to collect his wife, son and the family nanny and take them back to France, to finally begin married life.

Life in France is not without its challenges. The principal characters of the novel, with the exception of the nannies who look after the children before they are sent off to boarding school, are all upper class if not aristocratic, independently wealthy, who don’t have to work, have multiple houses, staff and spend their summers in Italy. But their relationships are a mess. The comedy of the novel derives largely from stereotypes about English and French aristocrats and their very different lifestyles. The main difference between the countries is their attitude towards infidelity. The French have a ‘laissez-faire’ approach, where affairs are seen as a private matter rather than a moral failure, and even accepted as part of long-term relationships. Charles-Edouard’s problem is that he is a enthusiastic adulterer who seems untroubled by being caught in the act. Eventually Grace realises he is never going to change. She returns to England and divorces him. He is remarkably untroubled by this, continuing with his long-term affairs, confident that his wife will sooner or later see sense and return to him.

As Charles-Edouard is a man-child driven by his libido above all else, it is hardly surprising that his son, Sigi, easily outwits him. Sigi likes his parents being separated – it means that all the potential new husbands and wives in their lives have to seek his approval, and approval means treats. He is spoilt rotten and frustrates Charles-Edouard’s lacklustre attempts to woo his wife into returning to France by simply not delivering his messages. Potential suitors for his mother’s newly available hand are equally easily disposed of given Sigi’s veto over their selection. Balls are attended, afternoon tea is drunk, French properties left unlooted by the Nazis are toured, and of course assignations are conducted more or less in the open. The comedy is dated, and I suspect it felt so even in the early 1950’s when the novel was first published, being more suited to the carefree times of the 20’s and 30’s. I even wonder whether this might have been a returned-to manuscript from the 30’s, updated with scant details of the slightly longer second world war?

The only indication we are in post-war Europe is a short discussion on homosexuality. Dexter, an obnoxious American, (it is almost a given that Americans in novels of this kind are obnoxious) is ranting about the link between homosexuality, which he calls ‘perversion’, and communism. Hughie, who by this point in the novel has overcome his break-up with Grace and is courting Albertine, who is one of Charles-Edouard’s mistresses. replies “But, old thing, they’re not sick. They just happen to like boys better than girls. You can’t blame them for that, it’s awfully inconvenient, and they’d give anything to be different if they could…I probably know more about them than you, having been at Eton and Oxford“. The revelation towards the end of the novel, that Dexter was a Russian spy and life-long communist, further undermines his credibility as a judge of public morality. Other than this brief defence of ‘perversion’ the social attitudes prevalent throughout the novel are those of earlier decades, when the Mitford’s had some relevance beyond historians of English class identities.

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford, 1951

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Book review

No-one writes to the Colonel, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1958

No One Writes to the Colonel is a long short story or short novella, coming in at under 70 pages. Famously Marquez said that he had to write One Hundred Years of Solitude so that people would read No One Writes to the Colonel. Which is really a throwing down of the gauntlet, challenging any reader who admires his longer form work to love this short story.

An unnamed retired Colonel, a veteran of earlier Colombian wars, lives in poverty with his wife and his rooster. The rooster has been bred to fight on cock-fights, and could potentially be worth a lot of money, either in prize money or sold on to other trainers. The rooster previously belonged to the colonel and his wife’s son, who has been killed in the political violence gripping the country.

For fifteen years the Colonel been waiting for the Government pension he was promised (or perhaps more accurately he believes he was promised, because his lawyer seems to be very unsure of his eligibility). Every week he meets the mailboat and each week he is sent home empty handed, because no-one writes to the Colonel. His wife has asthma, making their daily lives all the more difficult and miserable. The story opens with the colonel preparing to go to the funeral of a town musician. The reader is told that this death is significant because he was the first to die from natural causes in many years. Initially it is unclear why natural causes deaths should be so unusual, but it soon becomes apparent that most other deaths have been as a result of political violence. Their small village is under martial law – there is a nightly curfew at 11, and the funeral procession is forbidden from passing in front of the police station.

The centre of the story is dominated by the decision as to whether or not to sell their prize rooster. Potentially it could be very lucrative once the cock-fighting season starts in the new year, but they have to find a way to get through the winter first and without jobs or the long-awaited pension, they fear they may starve before that happens. So they are forced to consider selling the rooster for well below its actual value just to survive. There is also the complication that the rooster itself eats a lot of corn, taking food out of their mouths. The Colonel’s wife sometimes has to boil stones to try to convince their neighbours that they have something to eat. So this is not a community where the old and hungry feel able to ask for help from others – whether or not that help would be offered.

Despite the eternal non-appearance of his pension, the Colonel still lives in hope, hope that one day a letter will arrive, one day his rooster will win. The story ends on a defiant upbeat note. Having decided to keep the rooster until the cock-fighting season starts, he is berated by his wife who asks

“And meanwhile what do we eat?”.

“It had taken the Colonel seventy-five years – the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute – to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:

‘Shit.'”

No-one writes to the Colonel, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1958

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Book review

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, 1958

The central plot point of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana involves an unlikely spy, James Wormold, a middle-aged English vacuum salesman, making up details of secret military installations he claims are being built in the mountains outside Havana. Absurdly he sends his handlers in London detailed drawings of the rocket base using the schematics of the vacuum cleaners he sell, presciently named the Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner. What is strange is that I knew this detail before I opened the book, and it was one of the very few things I know about Greene’s work. But I found it frustrating that I can’t for the life of me remember how I knew that fact! There is a wider point here about how novels work their way into the cultural subconscious (so that, for example, Kate Bush could write a song about Wuthering Heights without ever having read the novel). I suspect the main reason this detail stuck in my head for so long (however it got there) is because of the way the novel strangely anticipated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The novel draws its humour from the gullibility of MI6. The central character, Wormold, is a vacuum cleaner salesman, selling only one company’s product (he seems to have only two different models of vacuum available). It shouldn’t matter, I know, but the idea of an Englishman selling vacuums in 1950’s Cuba just struck me as profoundly improbable. Who is buying these things? Greene himself had worked for British Intelligence during the war, and came to realise how easy it was for spies to file fictitious reports – who could check them for accuracy? This idea seems to have originated with the notorious case of Garbo, a Spanish double agent who pretended to have up to 27 agents working for him all over England, and who came to play an important role in misleading the Germans about the location of the 1944 landings. Greene wrote a first draft of the story in 1946 but it was the outbreak of the Cold War that gave the novel a new, more absurd, dimension.

The novel opens with our rather pathetic anti-hero struggling to keep his head above water, financially, mainly due to the demands of his spoilt teenage daughter. His wife has long since left him, leaving him to bring up his strictly Catholic daughter on his own. When he is clumsily approached by Hawthorne, an English spymaster, he becomes a spy himself almost accidentally. His initial doubts about the job are quickly overcome when he realises that this could be a lucrative profession if he recruits enough fictitious agents and claims enough expenses. His masterstroke comes when he concocts the idea of a secret mountain missile base using drawing of vacuum cleaner parts. Although British Intelligence is presented in this novel as incompetent and overly-trusting, it is very hard to see how else they could have dealt with the situation Wormold presents them with. They take his reports seriously – to do otherwise would have been reckless – and insist on him providing proof, suggesting different ways he can do so. They also send other agents out to Cuba to help him. That all seems fairly reasonable to me. Of course their main mistake is there inability to notice drawings of a vacuum clear when presented with them.

Up to the point at which Wormold starts his campaign of deception, the novel has been lightly comic, with Wormold being an accident-prone loser who is making things up as he goes along. He seems destined to be exposed as a fantasist at any point. But he reveals an inner strength when his improvised plans start to fall apart. Back in London, nobody knows he sells vacuum cleaners and has no reason to suspect his worrying reports. A secretary, Beatrice, and a radio assistant are sent out to join him and scale up his operation. As his lies become more outrageous Beatrice comes to suspect his elaborate fictions. She asks to speak to one of his agents, a pilot named Raúl. When a real-life pilot named Raul is killed in a ‘car accident’, but which is almost certainly an assassination, Wormold begins to panic. It is almost as if his lies are becoming reality and he sets out to save his fictional contacts, exposing himself to real danger while doing so. The reader is able to infer that his reports to London have been intercepted and decoded and his ‘operation’ is now under attack. Things get real very quickly and in the novel’s climax Wormold only narrowly escapes an attack on his own life.

An accidental spy who finds himself in the thick of an adventure, surviving encounters with assassins through dumb luck, sounds like a summary of a James Bond parody such as Johnny English or Austin Powers. Our Man in Havana was published only a few months after Dr No, the sixth in the James Bond series which started with Casino Royale in 1953 and seems to have been influenced by many of the tropes Fleming uses. I think it is best seen in this light – as a response to the portrayal of English spies as suave, sophisticated and almost unstoppable. But both Bond and Wormold get the girl in the end, and both beat the bad guys when it matters. Wormold discovers a surprising inner core when he and his family are threatened.

As I have mentioned several times before, I am not a massive fan of trigger/content warnings, but it comes as a shock when Greene uses the n-word in the novel’s opening sentence. The word is used casually by a character rather than the narrator and emphasises his background (he is a refugee from Germany). Other than the general contempt that British people casually treat all ‘foreigners’ in books from this period, the racism shown here does not reappear regularly, so if you can get past this instance you should be able to stick with the rest of the book. This is not Greene’s most sophisticated or complex novel and it is hard to warm to the principal characters, especially Wormold, but it has moments of light comedic touch, and is an interesting portrait of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Never has vacuum sales been more interesting.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, 1958

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Book review

A View from the Bridge, by Arthur Miller, 1955

A View from the Bridge is set in 1950s New York in an Italian-American neighbourhood. It is narrated by Alfieri, a lawyer, who opens the play by describing the violent history of the Italian/American community. He tells us that second-generation Italians are now more civilized and they use the law to resolve their disagreements. But there are exceptions, one of which is the story of the play.

Eddie Carbone, an Italian American dock worker, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine in a small apartment in Brooklyn. Eddie is protective and fatherly towards Catherine, but it slowly becomes apparent that as she approaches her 18th birthday his feelings for her are becoming dangerously unfatherly, especially as his relationship with his wife is no longer sexual. Catherine is ready to start stretching her wings and step out from the protective shadow of Eddie. He objects to her taking a job and to the way she dresses, anything that would expose her to the attention of other men. Beatrice seems to be aware that Eddie’s feelings towards Catherine are no longer purely paternal and encourages her to take the job, as a step towards eventual freedom and independence.

One afternoon Eddie breaks the news that he has agreed to accommodate two of Beatrice’s cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, who have arrived in New York as illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration was strictly enforced at this period in American history, which tells us some things don’t change, and if discovered the cousins are almost certain to be deported. However, within the protective Italian American community they are still able to work. Life back home in Italy is poverty stricken and immigrating to America using a network of people smugglers is a common means of escape.

Rodolpho is the more flamboyant of the two brothers – Marco is more brooding. While Marco plans to eventually return to Italy, Rodolpho wants to forge a career as a singer. His tendency to break into song while working on the docks attracts the wrong type of comment. Difference is suspect, and Eddie thinks (and perhaps hopes) he might be gay. This suspicion only becomes an issue when Rodolpho and Catherine start dating. Put simply, Eddie is jealous. When his attempts to ‘lay down the law’ and break them up fail, Eddie seeks advice from Alfieri, hoping that the law will prevent Catherine and Rodolpho from marrying. Of course he has no proof that Rodolpho is gay and is just marrying Catherine for a passport. Alfieri tells him the only thing he can do is report Rodolpho and Marco as illegal aliens, but this advice is framed as something that is unthinkable in the context of the ethics of the community. Time passes and things deteriorate, with Eddie becoming frantic about the trajectory of Catherine and Rodolpho’s relationship. Desperate (and drunk) he tries to prove Rodolpho is gay by kissing him. He then goes back to Alfieri, claiming that the kiss and specifically Rodolpho’s reaction, proves he is gay. Alfieri repeats his advice – the law cannot help. Eddie then does something that is taboo – even more so than being gay or wanting to sleep with your step-daughter – he reports the brothers to immigration services. The officials arrest Marco and Rodolpho and while Eddie claims the arrest is a surprise he convinces no-one. He is treated as persona non grata by the community. Alfieri bails the brothers out of custody but as soon as he is released Marco confronts Eddie, a fight breaks out and tragedy ensues.

A View from the Bridge has an interesting production history. It was first staged in 1955 as a one-act play. After it was poorly received Miller revised and extended the play to two acts. This longer play was much more successful and is the version most often performed today and is the one I read. The play’s origins go back to 1947. Miller was researching a screenplay in an area of New York near the docks. That screenplay eventually became ‘The Hook,’ which was based on a true story about corruption in the longshoremen’s union. Miller asked his friend Elia Kazan to direct the film, but when they tried to get funding for the shoot Columbia Pictures insisted in changes to the screenplay, in particular that the focus be changed from corrupt union leaders to Communists. Miller refused and the film was never made. Fast forward a few years and Kazan was making ‘On the Waterfront’, which is very closely based on ‘The Hook’. Kazan had testified before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities naming several of his former friends and fellow Communists, leading to them being blacklisted and struggling for years to find work in America – some had to go to the extreme of moving to the UK to work in cinema and theatre. Miller had been called before HUAC but had pleaded ‘the fifth’ i.e. refused to testify. ‘On the Waterfront’ was an attempt to excuse Kazan’s betrayal of his friends. In this Hollywood version of McCarthyism, those who betray their friends are the heroes. A View from the Bridge is Miller’s dramatic response to that argument. Betraying your friends is not heroic – but neither is it a simple case of villainy. Miller seems to be arguing that those who betray their families and friends are obviously in the wrong, but that their motivations can be complex and in some ways understandable. The play is obviously much more than a simple response to McCarthyism, but this context does inform any reading of the play. And of course the drama has much more significant contemporary resonance, with the issues of deportation and what it means to be American once more front and centre of the political stage. Any modern production that does not have the immigration officers dressed as ICE thugs would be missing a dramatic open goal.

A View from the Bridge, by Arthur Miller, 1955

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Book review

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens, 1855-1857

I have finally finished this year’s Dickens, Little Dorrit, with what I am embarrassed to admit was a sense of relief! It took me around two months to complete it. As will be obvious, at no point in the nine hundred pages did the novel ever really engage me. There were some characters who were more interesting, but their stories frequently fizzled out and were incomplete. I found the main plot line mechanical and dull, and most of the peripheral characters were two-dimensional. There were one or two elements of the novel that were unexpected, which I will expand upon below, but despite this I found it flawed and disappointing. As is probably too often the case, I am going to devote the bulk of this review to working out why I found it so.

Taking a step back for a moment, why do we read Dickens? It can’t really be for his plots – they are drawn out, driven by the demands of publication by instalment. They usually include hackneyed and repetitive plot devices: profoundly unlikely coincidences, long lost relatives reappearing after decades, lost wills, hidden identities and sudden reversal of fortunes. Little Dorrit has all these tropes and more, assembled in a slightly random order. When the myriad plot lines are resolved at the end of the novel the explanation given is baffling complex and improbable – the reader could never in a million years have worked out what was really going on behind all the subterfuge. Nor, frankly, would they have cared. The events of Little Dorrit pivot (we eventually find out) on a codicil to a will that passes through many hands before ending in those of a blackmailer, but by the time the intentions of the deceased are revealed it has long since ceased to matter.

Or do we read Dickens for his characters? Here the case is stronger – many of his creations live on in popular culture: Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Sam Weller, Mr Micawber and so on. But I would struggle to make this claim for any of the characters in Little Dorrit. The heroine, Amy Dorrit, is a kind and loving daughter, but her relationship with Arthur Clennam, the novel’s hero, if he can be called such, is one of Dickens many rather creepy much older man/young woman relationships which are so problematic in the light of the author’s personal life. Throughout the novel Clennam refers to Amy as ‘my child’, ‘my daughter’, or variations on this idea, and even though their eventual marriage is one of the least surprising events of the novel, it still feels uncomfortable. Of the novel’s other principal characters, the villain, Rigaud, is an appalling caricature, with his satanic smirk and twirling moustache. He is introduced to the reader from the outset as a cynical murderer and he never once shows any redeeming features nor any sign that he is going to defy the role he is cast in. He flits in and out of the narrative occasionally without ever progressing the plot, only to finally re-emerge to meet a grisly if fitting end.

Some of the novel’s minor characters showed more promise. John, the lovelorn junior warden of the Marshalsea pines away for Amy Dorrit with surprising dignity. Daniel Doyce is an entrepreneur who invents a mechanism – we ever never told anything more about it than it is potentially very useful – which is throttled by the bureaucracy of the Circumlocution Office. (In his essay on Dickens, to which I return every time I read anything by the latter, Orwell says “Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s “invention” in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, “of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures”, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the “invention” is!) Dickens is making a somewhat clumsy point about the dead hand of the Government service upon the spirit of industry and the absence of any effective intellectual property legislation. As the UK was at the height of the industrial revolution at this time, driven by innovation and enterprise, the satire barely lands a blow, despite the effort Dickens put into the portrait. Doyce eventually travels abroad – to Russia no less, which in the 1820’s (the novel’s setting) was not particularly problematic, but in the 1850’s the UK was at war with Russia in the Crimea – to find more rewarding work. There he prospers, only to finally return to London at the novel’s conclusion. We never really find out what happens to him, what his patent was for, whether it was granted, nor whether his new business succeeds (we can infer that it does).

Perhaps my favourite minor character was Flora Finching. Many years earlier she was engaged to be married to Arthur Clennam. His return from working in the far East finds her a widow. She cares for a truculent aunt of her late husband, nurtures a hope that her relationship with Arthur might be rekindled and speaks in a stream of consciousness that is one of the joys of the novel:

My Goodness Arthur! cried Flora, rising to give him a cordial reception, ‘Doyce and Clennam what a start and a surprise for though not far from the machinery and foundry business and surely might be taken sometimes if at no other time about midday when a glass of sherry and a humble sandwich of whatever cold meat in the larder might not come amiss nor taste the worse for being friendly for you know you buy it somewhere and wherever bought a profit must be made or they would never keep a place it stands to reason without a motive still never seen and learnt now not to be expected for as Mr F himself said if seeing is believing not seeing is believing too and when you don’t see you may fully believe you’re not remembered not that I expect you Arthur Doyce and Clennam to remember me why should I for the days are gone but bring another teacup here directly and tell her fresh toast and pray sit near the fire.”

Many reviewers accept that Little Dorrit is a sprawling mess, populated by thinly sketched characters and with a plot that manages to be both predictable and full of improbable coincidences. But “look at the social commentary” we are told. So let’s. The two main targets Dickens takes aim at in the novel are Government bureaucracy, in the form of the Circumlocution Office, and the practice of imprisoning people for debt, in this case in the very personal description of the Marshalsea debtor’s prison (Dickens’ father had served time in the Marshalsea and it clearly had a significant impact on Charles’s childhood. He was forced to leave school at the age of 12 to earn his keep).

The Circumlocution Office, Dickens’s attack on Government bureaucracy, is introduced in Chapter 10, ‘Containing the Whole Science of Government”:

“The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.”

This is just a small part of the description of the operation of the Office – Dickens writes at considerable length about the inefficiency and bloody-mindedness of the people who run the Office purely as a means of lining their own pockets without any consideration for the wider interests of the country. Nepotism is the key driver of this form of government. Reading the descriptions and Clennam’s relentless efforts to navigate the system, first to find a way to have Mr Dorrit released from debtor’s prison, and subsequently to secure a patent for Doyce’s mysterious invention, no-one who has ever struggled with bureaucracy, who has ever been put on hold for hours on end, or who has written countless letters in pursuit of a simple reply, could fail to empathise with the frustration described. Dickens was pushing at an open door here. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report into the operation of Government business had been published in February 1854 and to this day remains the founding document of the British Civil Service, enshrining it with “core values of integrity, propriety, objectivity and appointment on merit, able to transfer its loyalty and expertise from one elected government to the next”. The report accepted that the administration of Government was being crippled “both in internal efficiency and in public estimation”. I am not convinced this is effective satire. It’s taking a swipe at an easy target where the problem has already been recognised and was being addressed. It’s powerfully done, more with a steamroller than a scalpel.

Imprisonment for debt is portrayed as an everyday part of life in Victorian England. You fall into debt, you suffer the consequences. For some that included a lifestyle better than that enjoyed outside the walls of the prison. The reader is left to decide for themselves whether this is a sensible method of collecting money from people who don’t have any. (It is not widely known that while the 1869 Debtors’ Act largely abolished prison as a sanction for non-payment of debt in the UK, the Judgment Summons procedure still exists and includes imprisonment as a possible if little used sanction available to the Court:

” A judgment summons is an application by a creditor under s 5 of the Debtors Act 1869 requiring the debtor to attend court in circumstances where payment is due under an outstanding debt. If the creditor can prove to the satisfaction of the court, beyond reasonable doubt, that (a) the debtor either has or has had since the date of the original order or judgment the means to pay the sum owing under the original order or judgment and (b) has refused or neglected to pay, or refuses or neglects to pay, the debtor may be committed to prison for a period of up to six weeks or until payment of the sum which is owing.”)

Did Dickens’ portrait of the Marshalsea lead to the passage of the Debtors Act (which largely removed imprisonment as a sanction for debt)? I think we take it for granted that the answer to the question is largely yes, even if the impact of Little Dorrit was more to create a general perception that debtors’ prisons were cruel and ineffective, rather than leading directly to the reform legislation itself. It’s worth noting incidentally that the Marshalsea had closed in 1842, long before Little Dorrit was published (as Dickens explicitly acknowledges). I think this might be worth a deep dive one day, because I fear the truth might be more complicated. We know Dickens hated debtors’ prisons, because of what happened to his family and the impact it had on the trajectory of his own life. But if you take that out of the equation, is the portrait of the Marshalsea that harsh? Is being locked up there as bad as being in a criminal prison? To be honest, life in the Marshalsea actually seems quite comfortable. The warders are polite to the prisoners and happy to run them errands, rather than brutalising them. Perhaps this needs a separate post – were Victorian debtors prisons really that bad? (And if they were, why does Dickens make them sounds so bearable?)

It is usually fairly obvious in what overall direction Dickens’ novels are heading. But I got one thing seriously wrong in my anticipation of the plot of Little Dorrit. At the end of the first book, Mr Dorrit, having been locked away in the Marshalsea for decades, is, through the efforts of Clennam and Mr Pancks, discovered to be heir to a large fortune. We are told no more about it than that – he is going to inherit lots of money. I thought at this point that fate would intervene to prevent him from ever receiving his inheritance – most likely that he would die just before the will passes Probate, delayed by the incompetence or malevolence of the Circumlocution Office. But surprisingly no, it all goes completely smoothly and he leaves the Marshalsea with his head held high, spending most of the rest of the novel with his family and a vast entourage in Venice and Rome, trying all the while to bury his ignominious past. He is haunted by any suggestion that he was once a debtor, and takes offence at the slightest imaginary suggestion of his former life. He is accepted into this new strata of society without hesitation – his money is as good as anyone’s. Dickens seems to suggest that a life of wealth has parallels with the Dorrit’s former life of poverty, constrained as both were by society’s expectations. I am not so sure this point lands – spending one’s life on holiday without any restrictions on what one can buy or do seems pretty nice compared to the Marshalsea of Bleeding Heart Yard.

The novel’s meandering predictable plot, its unlovable or unbelievable characters, its ineffective satire and loose threads, illuminated only occasionally by flashes of humour, probably explain why Little Dorrit ranks below many of Dickens great novels. At least in my totally unscientific ranking system anyway!

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens, 1855-1857

Aside
Book review

The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis, 1973

The Riverside Villas Murder was written in the 1970’s, is set in the 1930’s, and is infused with the dominant social attitudes of the 1950s. Which all adds up to an uncomfortable mix. The story is told principally through the eyes of 14-year-old schoolboy Peter Furneaux. He is a typical 14 year-old, unable to go more than a few minutes at a time without thinking about sex. The mystery element of the story begins with a burglary at a local museum, where a mummified body and some Roman coins are stolen. Later, at a village dance, one of the Riverside Villas residents, a Mr Inman, provokes his neighbours by suggesting he has damaging information about them. During the dance, Mrs Trevelyan, a bored housewife, dances with Peter. Later she invites him to tea at her home, where she ‘seduces’ him. In the 1970’s this may have seemed comical, but fifty years on the scene is quite shocking in many ways. While it is Peter’s first sexual experience, Amis treats it as slapstick comedy: “What he had imagined so often and so long, and what actually happened on Mrs Trevelyan’s bed, resembled each other about as much as a fox-terrier and a rhinoceros.”  

A few days later, Inman is murdered. He staggers into the Furneaux home, soaking wet from having fallen into a nearby river and bleeding from a head wound. Peter calls Mrs Trevelyan for help, but Inman dies shortly after. The rest of the novel comprises the police investigation, led by a cast of policemen who I think we are supposed to find comic but to me were one-dimensional and unconvincing and whose investigation is chaotic.

As a murder-mystery the novel is dull – the explanation as to whodunnit, when it is finally revealed, manages to be both predictable, because it follows the traditions of the genre, and at the same time impossible to deduce, given that the murder weapon turns out to be an improbable Heath-Robinson contraption that no-one could possibly have foreseen. The murderer’s motives are also transparently thin.

But there is a much more serious problem with the novel. Amis clearly set out to write a traditional detective novel, with the central character being a young teenage boy. It follows all the tropes of the genre quite carefully, as if the novel were an exercise in nostalgia. The 1930’s setting – Amis was born in 1922, so would have been a teenager himself in the thirties and therefore very familiar with the popular culture reference which litter the novel – allows him to wallow in nostalgia for an England where murderers are executed, housewives are almost invisible unless they are sexual predators and gay men are the object of scorn and disgust. The novel also contains a scattering of casual uses of the n-word and gay slurs, which, when placed in the mouths of old-fashioned men such as Peter’s father or the police provide the excuse of authenticity but at the same time allow Amis to break social taboos. In other words the novel is pointedly offensive. This isn’t social observation, it is autobiography.

Which poses two questions: why read a book with such objectionable ideas, and why review it? I loved Lucky Jim, and while I have developed a much better understanding of some of its problematic aspects, I still have a fondness for it. Amis can craft a striking phrase – the fox-terrier/rhinoceros quote above for example – and he did go on to win the Booker Prize. So it is hard to dismiss him as an author, and I still read him occasionally to see if he could ever recapture the brightness and humour of Lucky Jim. So far there have only been glimpses. As to the question of why one would review a book that deserves to go out of print and remain so, that’s more straightforward. These are not recommendations but posts noting what books I have read. No more no less. I don’t post about every single book I read (although I should according to my self-imposed rules) but I try to miss as few as possible. And if I have saved anyone the experience of reading the Riverside Villas Murder then it will have been worth it.

The Riverside Villas Murder by Kingsley Amis, 1973

Aside
Book review

When Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler opens, Hedda and her husband Jorgen have just arrived in their new home from an extended – five or six months – honeymoon. Jorgen’s aunt, Julle, is keen to know whether Hedda is already pregnant and drops many hints on the subject, such as “I don’t expect you wasted your time on your honeymoon, did you, Jorgen?”. At first Jorgen completely ignores her. When he later wonders what they are going to do with their spare rooms, Julle says “You might find a use for them, when the time comes”. He perks up at the idea that the rooms could be used to store his books and papers! As she is preparing to leave, Jorgen says of Hedda, who has by this point joined them, “Have you noticed how well and bonny she looks? I declare she’s filled out beautifully on the trip.” “Filled out” is a strange expression to use of a 29 year old woman (obviously a potential translation issue) but is typical of the way Jorgen infantilises Hedda. It would not be surprising for a nineteenth-century couple to fall pregnant on their honeymoon given the lack of readily available effective contraception (and the long cold Scandinavian nights!). But Hedda angrily rejects any such suggestion: “Oh, do you have to…“. When Julle leaps eagerly on the hint: “Filled out?“. Tesman replies “Yes, Aunt Julle, you don’t notice it so much when she’s wearing that dress. But I…well, I have occasion to….” Tesman is scandalously suggesting he has seen her naked and is therefore better able to judge whether she has ‘filled out’. Hedda again rejects the idea, insisting “I’m exactly the same as I was when we left“. Is this because she is indeed not pregnant, or is she in denial?

Act One ends with Hedda playing her favourite game of winding up those around her. She says to her husband “Oh well, I’ve got one thing at least that I can pass the time with“. He leaps to the assumption that she is hinting at a pregnancy and is crushed when she reveals she is talking about “My pistols, Jorgen“. This scene is also the reveal that Hedda was Lovberg’s secret lover, the punchline to Mrs Elvert’s earlier reference to “a shadow of a woman that stands between us (her and Lovberg). Someone from his past…He said that when they parted, she threatened to shoot him with a pistol”.

In Act two, the Judge joins in the hectoring of Hedda about her putative pregnancy, condescendingly telling her that her boredom with married life will pass “When you’re faced with…what may I … perhaps a little pompously…refer to as a sacred and ….and exacting responsibility? (Smiles). A new responsibility, my little lady.” Such language again infantilises Hedda, denying her agency, and once again, she rejects the idea immediately: “(angry) Be quiet! You’ll never see anything of the sort!” The Judge is as keen as Julle on the idea and won’t let it lie, responding “(carefully) We’ll talk about it in a year’s time… at the very latest”. This is met with yet another absolute rejection: “(shortly) I’ve no aptitude for any such thing, Mr Brack, No responsibilities for me, thank you!” And when he tries to continue the conversation, she shuts it down once more: “Oh, be quiet I say!”

If Hedda treats her pistols as substitute children, for Lovborg and Thea, the manuscript is their ‘baby’, one Hedda manically destroys, saying as she does so: “Now I am burning your child, Thea!—Burning it, curly-locks! [Throwing one or two more quires into the stove.] Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s. [Throws the rest in.] I am burning—I am burning your child.”

Lovborg and Thea agree that this manuscript was their child: (Mrs Elvsted): “Do you know, Lovborg, that what you have done with the book—I shall think of it to my dying day as though you had killed a little child.

Lovborg. Yes, you are right. It is a sort of child-murder.

Mrs Elvsted. How could you, then—! Did not the child belong to me too?”

In the play’s final act, there is a scene which is almost universally interpreted as confirmation that Hedda is indeed pregnant. She has just confessed to Tesman to having burnt Lovborg’s manuscript and continues:

“Well, I may as well tell you that—just at this time— [impatiently breaking off.] No, no; you can ask Aunt Julle. She will tell you, fast enough.

Tesman. Oh, I almost think I understand you, Hedda! [Clasps his hands together.] Great heavens! do you really mean it! Eh?

Hedda. Don’t shout so. The servant might hear.

Tesman. [Laughing in irrepressible glee.] The servant! Why, how absurd you are, Hedda. It’s only my old Berte! Why, I’ll tell Berte myself.

Hedda. [Clenching her hands together in desperation.] Oh, it is killing me, —it is killing me, all this!”

If this ‘confession’ is intended to ensure Jorgen’s continuing devotion, it is short-lived, as he almost immediately throws himself into the attempt to recreate the burnt manuscript with Mrs Elvsted. His hypothetical child-to-be is quickly forgotten. But it is far from explicit.

If you google ‘Is Hedda Gabler pregnant?’ all the online sources agree – yes, she is pregnant, but she is in denial about it. But wait a minute – have you spotted the irony there? This argument suggests that Hedda doesn’t know her own body. All the characters who assume she must be pregnant after her honeymoon are quick to pick up on any indications she might be gaining weight (and some productions add detail such as her having morning sickness, to press the point home). Both characters within the play and critics seem to agree on this point – but Hedda herself has no agency in this issue. We are told very little about the honeymoon or the characters’ intimate life, other than the fact that Hedda finds her husband “horribly tedious”, (his academic focus is on “An Account of the Domestic Crafts of Medieval Brabant”) but we go along with the nods and the winks, the innuendo implicit in phrases such as ‘blossoming‘. Are we the audience being cast as avatars of Aunt Julle and others, clucking over an anticipated ‘happy event’ without ever once listening to Hedda?

Why does this matter? Hedda’s decision at the end of the play is usually interpreted as a form of escape, a decision to leave a situation in which she feels trapped without any other option. I tis worth remembering that the murder (as they would have seen it) of an unborn child would have been an abomination to a Victorian audience. Norway was a largely Evangelical Lutheran society (so the internet tells me) but most nineteenth century audiences would have been shocked and appalled at Hedda’s actions, both towards herself and her unborn child. While generalisations are difficult I expect she would have attracted little sympathy. This is borne out by the initial critical reactions to the play which were a mixture of bewilderment and hostility, with critics calling its 1891 premiere in Munich a “hideous nightmare of pessimism,” ‘immoral’, and Hedda herself a “beast”. Despite this reception audiences kept coming, compelled by the drama of the piece.

This is of course one of those literary puzzles to which there can never be a definitive answer. Ibsen leaves enough evidence for the reader to conclude that Hedda both is and isn’t pregnant, with the actors and producers being given a form of casting vote in terms of how they portray the character. But I would suggest this is not a simple choice and is one which can potentially influence the impact of the whole play on audiences.

Postscript

It occurred to me a while after writing the above that it treats the issue of pregnancy in a very binary way. Technically that may be true – a woman is either pregnant or she is not – but in reality the situation can be and often is more complicated. For instance, a woman may be pregnant but not realise it – quite possible in Hedda’s case. Equally the reverse can be true. More commonly, a woman might simply not be sure whether she is pregnant or not. In the days before modern pregnancy testing that must have been an almost universal experience in the early weeks of pregnancy. It is also quite possible that Hedda is unable to have children – this would explain her attempted ‘confession’ to Jorgen in Act Four – or that she had been pregnant but had miscarried – again, something that she would probably feel merited a confession. It is also not beyond the bounds of possibility that Jorgen is not the father of Hedda’s hypothetical baby, which would go some way to explaining her cry that it is killing her. So the ‘Hedda is pregnant but in denial’ interpretation of this aspect of the play is one of many supported by the text if the reader and performers are prepared to open themselves up to alternative and arguably more interesting readings.

Is Hedda Gabler pregnant?

Aside
Book review

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a psychological portrait of the central character, a young wife tortured by the restraints of social expectation, bored silly by married life and dreading the future. She attempts to find relief from her stifling marriage – even though this is a life of privilege compared to those of many – by manipulating the weaker minds around her, not least her rather dim husband. The play opens with Hedda and Jorgen Tesman arriving home from an extended honeymoon. They are soon visited by Tesman’s aunt, Julle (in many translations this is written as Julie), who is her sister’s carer, and soon thereafter by Mrs Elvsted, a friend whose marriage is in trouble. Later Judge Brack, a friend of Tesman’s, comes to invite him to a drinking party. The ensemble is complete by Ejlert Lovborg, (“a poor depraved creature”) a writer, reformed alcoholic and former lover of Hedda’s, who is now in a new relationship with Mrs Elvsted.

In other hands this would be the stuff of drawing room comedy. But Ibsen’s vision is dark, and things start to get complicated very quickly. From the moment she is introduced it is clear Hedda is what we would now call ‘high maintenance’. She complains that there are too many flowers in her sitting room and she bosses Berte the maid around: “All the things the young mistress wanted unpacked before she could get off to bed”. She tells Berte off for forgetting to use her husband’s academic title and is then sharp with her husband’s aunt, saying “Such an early visit” and teases her quite cruelly about her new hat, pretending to mistake it for the maid’s. But she reserves her seriously sadistic side for her ‘friend’ Thea Elvsted.

Thea’s story is an important analogue of Hedda’s. She was once romantically involved with Jörgen. Thea is now trapped in a loveless marriage, to a man twenty years her senior, looking after his children by his first wife who she was originally employed to care for. By her marriage she has simply become an unwaged servant. Lövborg came to their house in the country as a tutor for the children and they quickly became romantically involved. When the play opens Thea has left her husband to join Lovborg, ignoring the inevitable scandal that will follow. She went to school with Hedda – this is a close knit community – where Hedda obviously bullied her, pulling her hair. She reminds Hedda that “you once said you were going to burn it off”. Later Hedda says “I think I’ll burn your hair off after all“. Is this a sick joke, or a serious threat? Thea has the courage to do what Hedda seemingly cannot, that is to leave her unhappy marriage and follow her lover.

Hedda is jealous of and angered by Thea’s relationship with Lovborg. When she and Lovborg were lovers, he lived a life of excess, and she lived vicariously through him. But now he has found some stability with Thea, has sobered up, and has published a successful book, with another nearly complete. Hedda attempts to undermine this relationship, goading him into drinking despite his well-known struggles with his sobriety. Initially she tries this by offering him punch, which he declines. When he proves strong enough to resist this temptation she argues that he should drink “otherwise people might so easily get the idea that you are not…not really confident, really sure of yourself“. In other words you need to drink to show you are not an alcoholic! This distresses Thea, causing her to cry “Oh God, Oh God, Hedda! What are you saying? What are you trying to do?” I think it is very clear what she is trying to do – she is pulling the wings off flies, just because she can. Hedda may not be a monster, but she does some monstrous things. At the end of the Act the Judge, Tesman and Lovborg head off for a party at the Judge’s house, while the womenfolk stay at home, waiting for them to return.

Act Three opens the morning after the party – ‘almost an orgy’, in Tesman’s eyes at least, but clearly the scene of some excess. Hedda and Thea have been up all night, waiting for their men to return in good time, as promised. Some of the members of the party, Lovborg included, have headed off to a brothel to continue drinking (and, it is implied, so on.) Tesman comes home, but quickly goes out again on receipt of news about his ailing aunt. He only has time to give Hedda the manuscript of Lovborg’s brilliant new book, which he has lost during the night’s bacchanalian excesses. (When I go drinking I always take with me the only copy of a precious manuscript for some light reading). Lovborg does not know he has found the manuscript. He leaves Judge Brack and Hedda to chat. She tells him that she understands that he has aspirations to be “the only cock in the basket” an expression meaning dominant male in a group of females. He admits “Yes, that’s what I want. And I’ll fight for that end with every means at my disposal“. Hedda responds “I’m content, so long as you don’t have any sort of hold over me“. As Brack goes to leave, this innuendo-laden (and at the same time ominous) exchange concludes their conversation:

“Hedda: [Rising.] Are you going through the garden?

Brack: Yes, it’s a short cut for me.

Hedda: And then it is a back way, too.

Brack: Quite so. I have no objection to back ways. They may be piquant enough at times.

Hedda: When there is ball practice going on, you mean?

Brack: [In the doorway, laughing to her.] Oh, people don’t shoot their tame poultry, I fancy.

Hedda: [Also laughing.] Oh no, when there is only one cock in the basket—“

The Judge is quickly replaced by Lovborg and then Thea. The Tesman’s drawing room is the centre of much coming and going throughout the play – the only person who never leaves is Hedda, emphasising how trapped she is. Lovborg confesses he has lost his manuscript, although he lies to Thea saying he has deliberately destroyed it. When she leaves Hedda gives him one of her pistols, explicitly encouraging him to kill himself. When he then leaves, she quickly and impulsively burns the manuscript, saying “Now I am burning your child, Thea!—Burning it, curly-locks!… Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s. [Throws the rest in.] I am burning—I am burning your child”

Act Four sees Hedda face the consequences of her actions.When told of Lovborg’s suicide (between the acts), she initially celebrates:

Hedda. [In a low voice.] Oh, what a sense of freedom it gives one, this act of Eilert Lovborg’s.

Brack. Freedom, Mrs. Hedda? Well, of course, it is a release for him—

Hedda. I mean for me. It gives me a sense of freedom to know that a deed of deliberate courage is still possible in this world,—a deed of spontaneous beauty.

But when Brack reveals he knows that she gave Lovborg the pistol, and that he intends to use this knowledge to exert control over Hedda, effectively to blackmail her, she realises she is running out of options:

Hedda. [Looks up at him.] So I am in your power, Judge Brack. You have me at your beck and call, from this time forward.

Brack: [Whispers softly.] Dearest Hedda—believe me—I shall not abuse my advantage.

Hedda. I am in your power none the less. Subject to your will and your demands. A slave, a slave then! [Rises impetuously.] No, I cannot endure the thought of that! Never!

I won’t spoil the ending, just in case you haven’t seen or read it, but it won’t come as a surprise.

So that’s what happens. But is it any good? Is the play entertaining, thought provoking, profound? Is Hedda theatre’s ‘female Hamlet’, as often claimed? (Incidentally I haven’t been able to find a source for this much-repeated claim). Is Ibsen really one of modern theatre’s greatest playwrights? There is no question of his dominant status in modern theatre. Equally there’s no question that the play is densely packed and full of incident, complex characters, drama and back-story. Yet the same time it is very static, set in just the one location. Many of the play’s most dramatic incidents occur off-stage. And the complex web of relationships between the characters has little time to further develop – the total elapsed time in the play is at most forty-eight hours.

Ultimately, the play stands or falls on whether the reader/audience finds the ending convincing or not. Is Hedda driven to such a state of extreme distress that she sees no way out, or is her decision (like many of the others she takes in the course of the play) taken capriciously? On the page, I didn’t find her decision was understandable. That may well be my problem – a failure to fully empathise with the character – rather than Ibsen’s. I also completely recognise that on the stage this concern could be swept away by a compelling portrait of Hedda and the rest of the cast. But in the absence of those factors, on the page alone, Hedda is hard to empathise with and even harder to understand. I recognise that the impact of the play on a Victorian audience would of course have been dramatically different to the way the play lands today. All stories age and change with time, and I can’t begin to imagine how a Victorian audience would have reacted to Hedda, other than it would almost certainly have been very different. (Of course I don’t need to guess because the contemporary reaction is fairly well recorded, but empathising with that reaction is almost impossible). Can the play be brought up to date in production? Well it continues to be performed at the highest theatrical level, so this surely isn’t a text that has aged badly. I confess that as of now, not having seen the play on the stage, the secret of what makes it so highly regarded eludes me.

Finally, a quick word on translation. I used two different translations in preparing this post: the Gutenberg project ebook translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer, and the World’s classics edition translated by James McFarlane and Jens Arup. The internet tells me that the Archer translation is one of the oldest available, but neither of these appear when searching for the ‘best’ translation. But I make no comment on the value of either of these translations – I am the last person who could comment on such matters – the point is they are strikingly different. The Gosse/Archer translation uses the phrase ‘cock of the basket’ to translate Hedda’s last words; the McFarlane/Arup version translates this idiomatic phrase as “the only cock in the yard”. Neither phrase means very much in English – cock of the walk probably comes closest, but it means dominant in any group rather than a dominant male amongst a group of females. It is difficult to imagine the performance making the meaning of the phrase much clearer. If therefore any of the quotes used above do not appear in your copy of Ibsen, I blame the translation!

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, 1891

Aside
Book review

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, 1985

Blood Meridian is an extraordinary novel. It is profoundly violent, and at the same time quite lyrically beautiful. It reminded me at various points of The Odyssey, The Inferno, and even Don Quixote, without ever being self-consciously ‘literary’.

The events of the novel take place in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. During that war, the US effectively conquered the north of Mexico, which eventually became the South Western states including Texas, New Mexico and California. But despite this victory US control of this area was limited. Native tribes including the Comanche and Apache were still active and represented a threat to Mexicans and ‘Americans’ alike. Effectively this vast area of land was lawless. Settlers were vulnerable to raids by these tribes, so local governments in both northern Mexico and the Southwestern US employed mercenaries to hunt down these tribes, offering a bounty for each grisly proof of a kill.

The novel follows the adventures of an unnamed, troubled teenager known only as ‘the kid’. Born in Tennessee, by the age of fourteen he has “a taste for mindless violence”. He runs away from home and soon meets Judge Holden – the Judge – a character who haunts the rest of the novel. When he first encounters the Judge he incites a crowd to attack a preacher. This incident could be the trigger for the kid’s subsequent life of violence. He joins a militia planning to travel into Mexican territory: this is presented as a campaign to protect American settlers but it is clearly just an excuse for the gang to go looking for plunder. However, the gang is poorly prepared and under-equipped and is quickly wiped out by a war party of Comanches. This is not going to be a straightforward Western where the superior firepower of the Americans can overwhelm the poorly equipped ‘natives’. Blood Meridian is informed by many of the tropes of the tropes of the traditional Western narrative but consistently subverts them in this way.

The kid survives the massacre and sets out through the desert looking for somewhere to rest and recover, the first of many such aimless journeys. When he does eventually reach a town he is arrested by Mexican soldiers and jailed without trial. His time on a chain gang ends when he signs up for another gang of scalp-hunters led by Captain Glanton (closely based on a real historical figure). Glanton’s gang (although it is never described as such, that’s clearly what it is) includes the Judge that the kid had met earlier in the novel.

Much of the rest of the narrative follows the gang’s campaign of mindless violence through the increasingly hostile landscapes of this part of Mexico. In theory the gang are authorised by the Mexican authorities to kill Native Americans and return their scalps for a bounty. But they quickly work out that it is hard to tell Native American scalps from those from Mexicans, and begin killing and scalping people indiscriminately. Some of the scenes of the massacres, including those in which women children and babies are slaughtered, can be hard to stomach. Consider that your trigger warning.

The narrative point of view McCarthy uses to tell his story is chillingly calm and totally non-judgmental. The massacre scenes are stripped of adjectives and atmosphere, emphasising their brutality. The gang have no conscience, no sense of humanity at all. People are just products to be harvested.

As the long journeys to find more people to kill continue, we learn more about the Judge. One of the gang members tells a story about how he once helped an earlier version of the gang manufacture gunpowder which they then used to massacre the Apaches chasing them. The Judge is an enigmatic, almost supernatural figure. At times he is an avenging angel, at others he takes an academic interest in his environment, making sketches of the landscapes. the flora and fauna, and the native American artefacts that litter the landscape. He is perhaps Western colonialism personified, wreaking huge damage on the peoples and countryside under the guise of academic analysis.

Although largely operating with impunity, the gang eventually goes too far – after a fight at a cantina they attack a group of Mexican soldiers. Their contract with the local government is cancelled and a bounty is posted on Glanton’s head. The gang leave the area and travel to a neighbouring state, where they pick up another contract for Apache scalps. This is the cue for further scenes of brutality, although this time the gang meets more substantial opposition from both Native American warriors and Mexican soldiers. Eventually, at the Colorado River, they seize control of a key ferry crossing, and grow rich exploiting and robbing their passengers. This good life is abruptly ended by another attack from a local tribe, and most fo the gang are killed, including Glanton himself. The kid survives, albeit seriously wounded, and along with another survivor tries to escape. But now they are being tracked by the Judge, who has turned against them, and pursues them relentlessly.

Blood Meridian is shocking in its brutality, but also lyrically beautiful. McCarthy evokes the stark beauty of the landscape:

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.“

But as the novel unfolds the landscape becomes increasingly hellish, with more and more bodies littering the ground. This is a journey into hell.

The only element of the novel that for me fell a little flat was the Judge’s philosophising. He is presented to the reader as a guru, someone whose thoughts on life and existence are worth listening to.

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”

Or

“Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.“

Rather than these being profound meditations on power, good and evil, and so on, for me they were trite and out of place in the narrative. They weren’t needed. This didn’t in any way spoil the novel for me – I was more than happy to accept these speeches as brief interruptions soon passed by, but they felt heavy-handed, when everything the author wanted to say was already very clear. The wild west was not a place of adventure but a war-zone, devoid of morality. McCarthy has a bleak vision of humanity, but this is what makes him a prophet for our times.

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, 1985

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