Category Archives: Uncategorized

100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Harper Lee, TKAM, To Kill a Mockingbird, Uncategorized

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1960

The subset of people who have read ‘Go Set a Watchman’ but have not read’To Kill a Mockingbird’ must be pretty small, and until this week included me, embarrassed although I am to admit it. Yes, until this week I had not read this the ultimate American classic. I had seen the film, of course, and the stage play, but somehow never got round to the novel, until now. zzzzzzzzzzzzz

I can completely understand why the novel holds its place in the affections of American readers. It captures a lost America, and shows that while its passing is on the whole a good thing, particularly in terms of civil rights, something has been lost as well.

I wanted to address the question as to whether ‘Go Set a Watchman’ has in any way had a negative effect on the reputation of ‘TKAM’. I think this debate is based on a false premise, namely that ‘GSAW’ is a sequel to ‘TKAM’. Certainly it was published later than the original novel, and is set around 20 years later. In the later novel, Atticus is no longer seen through the innocent eyes of a young daughter’s hero-worshipping eyes, but from those of a mature, travelled woman. Of course he is no longer on a pedestal, and a lifetime of living in the deep South has taken its toll on his tolerances. Civil rights had not stood still in that time either, and what was once a liberal position had become reactionary, simply by staying still as the world moved on.

But. I think that it is important to remember that ‘GSAW’ is, in terms of composition, the earlier novel. It is in fact the first draft of ‘TKAM’. Looked at that way, Atticus doesn’t become more reactionary, but more liberal and tolerant as he developed as a character in Lee’s imagination. We also owe thanks to Lee’s editor for this metamorphosis.

There is a charming innocence to ‘TKAM’, achieved in large part through Scout’s narration. She is disarmingly honest, kind, and in the main unspoiled by the prejudices and racism around her. It has still taken its toll, of course – she uses the n-word and other insulting racial epithets freely, and would prefer Atticus to have refused to defend Tom Robinson. Tom’s tragic, off stage death doesn’t seem to trouble her, although neither does Bob Ewell’s at the end of the novel. Lee never seems entirely sure whether the trial at the heart of the novel is her focus, or the story of the agoraphobe Boo Radley which is more prominent at the novel’s opening and close. She manages to weave the two stories together at the death but it is not so much as climax as an end.

I suspect the other primary reason for the novel’s enduring importance is that it contains so many platitudes. Children believe that all the problems of the world can be solved if only people were nice to one another, and that is the principal sentiment of the novel. I started to keep a track of the platitudes, but gave up after a while:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

“real courage is, instead of … a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

“Atticus, he was real nice.””Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
People are nice, once you get to know them. Never give up. Folks are all the same under their skin. This homespun philosophy gets a bit overly saccharine after a while. TKAM is a plea for tolerance, not only for the rights of black people to a fair hearing under the country’s justice system, but also for the traditions of the South. Many white people in the South had felt under attack since before the end of slavery, and Lee also offers these people a voice, less explicitly here than in ‘GSAW’, but unmistakeably nonetheless. Lee explained this is a rare commentary on her own novel once, saying:
“Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.” 
The heritage of all Southerners? Or all white Southerners? The idea that the Southern code of honor and conduct that led to mass lynchings, the KKK, and segregation was worth preserving despite everything is a challenge to the interpretation that this novel is a straightforward advocate for the civil rights cause. There is a risk that we sentimentalise the novel, and see it as a simple anti-racism tract, when the portrayal of the South is more nuanced than that.
I’d love to know if you agree?
Standard
100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review, Uncategorized

Rabbit Redux – John Updike – 1971

The Penguin Modern Classics editions of Updike’s Rabbit quartet (Run, Redux, Rich, and at Rest) contain an afterword by the author which in some ways makes the reviewer redundant, offering insight into the composition of the novels to which few could hope to achieve. Of course, I am going to have a try.

Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle aged, blue-collar AmericZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZan. His wife is sleeping with a work colleague, and soon leaves Rabbit and his teenage son Nelson. Harry is in a dead end job as a print-setter, which even in 1969, the novel’s setting, was clearly becoming obsolete. The reproductions of Harry’s set type which appear in the novel are cruelly riddled with errors, suggesting he isn’t even any good at his job. While the narrative point of view is largely Harry’s/Rabbit’s, we do not gain much insight into his feelings. He seems to take his wife’s betrayal in his stride, although it obviously hits him harder than he realises, as is shown later in the novel when his behaviour begins to get more erratic. Invited out by a work colleague, a black man who Harry would normally not associate, Harry picks up Jill, a wealthy 18 year old young woman fleeing suburban Connecticut. Although more like his lost daughter than a replacement wife, she moves in with him and Nelson. Later her  ‘friend’ Skeeter, a radical Vietnam veteran follows her and also moves in, causing scandal in the neighbourhood.  While Harry and Nelson are out visiting friends the house suffers an arson attack, and Jill is killed. Finally, in the aptly named Safe Haven motel, Harry reconciles with his wife, after a fashion, and they fall asleep together.

The period setting of the novel provides an important backdrop to its events. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon – Harry watches the landing on a fuzzy black and white television in his mother’s bedroom. Race riots break out across America, and the war in Vietnam continues to divide the country. Harry is defiantly conservative in the face of several protest voices, not least Skeeter, who challenges him on issues of race and the war.

It has to be said that Harry is not a pleasant character. He is unashamedly racist, sexually exploits the clearly vulnerable Jill, who is half his age,  and takes pleasure from hurting her during sex. He beats his wife when he finds out she has been unfaithful, and is a poor father. He has many other faults which I am not going to spell out here – suffice to say he is a hard hero to like.

It’s equally hard to avoid the simple reading of this novel that has Harry as an extended metaphor for America. Updike specifically invites this comparison in his afterword – “The character of Harry Angstrom was, for me, a way in – a ticket to the America all around me.” Skeeter’s “invasion” of Harry’s home, hard to understand otherwise, is representative of the rise of black power in America, the intrusion of what Harry/Updike sees as an alien race. His values – paternity, patriotism, fidelity – are under attack from all around. In other words this is a deeply conservative novel in which Harry struggles to at first resist, then come to terms with the changes sweeping America in the late 60’s. He is a victim throughout the novel, weakly accepting what happens to him, not challenging his wife’s lover when he confronts him, taking redundancy without complaint, even spinelessly accepting Skeeter’s moving into his house and sleeping with Jill – he doesn’t like it, but he can do nothing about it. He has a sharp tongue towards his family and friends, but is a profoundly weak man. The reader feels sorry for Harry, perhaps, but that’s the extent of it.

Reading the second novel in a quartet is not the best way to approach a writer’s output (I started the Harry Potter series by reading The Goblet of Fire, stupidly) but I am torn on whether I want to read more about Rabbit. What might bring me back, one day, is Updike’s undoubted way with a sentence:

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation”.

Standard
Uncategorized

Comment: Have you ever been stuck?

I am in limbo at the moment, struggling manfully with a novel I refuse to give up on (Stella Gibbons, The Bachelor) but with which I can make very limited progress. This was a spur of the moment, I must have something to read purchase, done in a spirit of optimism and refusal to acknowledge the evidence of Starlight and its predecessors. I have been here before – some novels almost refuse to be read, characters blur together into an amorphous mass of old ladies and “incidents” either flatly refuse to happen, or simply fail to raise any interest in the reader. text just slides off the eyes like unwanted homework.

I call this the “meh” school of literature.

If there has been one thing that has deterred me from ever trying to write fiction myself it is the fear that what I produce would be not bad, but boring. I don’t under-estimate for one second the difficulty of writing a good novel, one with interesting characters and plot development, that entertains with incident, characterisation or humour, that has something original to say. The fact that the novels I have written about her in previous months ever got published let alone bought, read and enjoyed is a triumph.

But I will finish this novel, which bluntly has none of these things, to make the investment of however many hours of my life it is not completely pointless, and then take a cold look at my reading list selection from this point on.

Standard
Book review, Kim Newman, The Hound of the D'Urbevilles, Uncategorized

The Hound of the D’Urbevilles by Kim Newman

Why restrict yourself to one clever idea – the Holmes stories written from the perspective of Moriarty’s Watson? – when two – mixing in themes characters and plots from 19th Century fiction – will be twice the fun? Well, perhaps on reflection the whole is less than the sum of the parts, if I can use my second cliché this early in the review. There are some problems with this approach. Let’s start with Colonel “Basher” Moran, the character Newman creates to act as Moriarty’s second in charge and his chronicler. Moran is a nasty piece of work, and while the author tries to give him all the roguish charm at his disposal, it is still impossible to like Moran, let alone feel any sympathy for him. Perhaps at the end of the novel, when effectively abandoned by Moriarty he takes his revenge in a clever twist, one is twinged, but by then it’s a bit too late. Only in top class writing can we like mass murderers like Moran – here he is drawn as a cartoonish figure to help avoid any natural repulsion from his killing, whoring, and generally dissolute behaviour.

Secondly, in the Conan Doyle stories Moriarty is, deliberately, very lightly drawn. The absence of any detail about him adds to his sinister omnipresence. Here he comes across as less sinister master criminal as peevish schoolmaster – I exaggerate, but not much. Being second in command to a bloodless criminal mastermind might be an interesting job, but here Moriarty is just an inverted caricature of Sherlock Holmes – all his traits, quirks, and characteristics are reflected in the portrait of Moriarty, including the experiments with bees/wasps.
Lastly there is the use of stories, characters and themes from 19th Century literature. At first this seems like it might work – these stories provide a structure and setting for the Moran and Moriarty characters to develop. But it doesn’t quite work. The first story used is a very obscure Zane Grey novel – the epitome of the trashy disposable pot-boiler. Later stories are stronger but the gimmicky impression is hard to shake off. While most of the borrowed themes are recognisable, inevitably one feels irritated if one spots a reference, but is unable to remember its source – particularly as Newman seems to prefer the more obscure quarters of 19th Century fiction. Sometimes it works, as with the Green Eyed Goddess chapters – but I was left wondering why not just invent your own story lines?

Standard
Uncategorized

Comment: Reading Lists

Remarkably this will be one of the only resolutions I have ever kept. The aim was to keep a record of books read in 2012 for posterity’s sake, and to allow me space to record my thoughts and impressions of the books. It has led me to think of some possible new resolutions for 2013 and beyond:

  • Shakespeare – reading the whole of the canon, including the poetry, in one year. More than do-able, especially as I have read probably 75% already (although I would have to reread, as most of this was 30 years ago!)
  • Russian classics – a big black hole in my reading thus far, although I am coming close to finishing Crime and Punishment, finally.
  • Booker prize winners – about 40 novels or so which is comfortably do-able in a year – again I can tick off a good dozen or so already, although some, such as Cloud Atlas would definitely be worth revisiting. Other, like The Old Devils, Amis senior, probably less so. I reckon I could take a good bite out of all shortlisted books as well, but I think that counts as sadism.
  • Noble laureates – lots of world literature out there which I know nothing about.

Any other ideas?

Standard
Uncategorized

At Home – Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is a wonderfully entertaining writer. His short book about Shakespeare was superbly written and erudite, and despite covering ground so well trodden he managed to bring new perspectives, as well as demolishing the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” position devastatingly. I also enjoyed “Notes from a Small Island” and his book on Australia, unimaginatively titled “Down Under”. “A Short History of Everything” was however almost certainly over-reaching himself. So my expectations on approaching “At Home” were high. 
Bryson’s starting point is a history of his Norfolk home. Sadly, despite extensive research, he is unable to find anything particularly interesting to say about it. From this point he wanders through his home and uses each location as the starting point for a long digression on loosely themed ideas and thoughts prompted by the room. Sometimes there is some coherence to these, but often not. I was left with the impression of someone struggling to find a framework on which to drape a lot of quite interesting facts, and ultimately failing.
That’s not to say there is not much to divert one on the way through (goodness me) 700 pages. Every page bursts with detail and ideas, and even his asides are noteworthy – so much so that returning to the book today to refresh my memory led me to a re-reading of several sections. I was looking for, and found, the comments on infant mortality, and the attitudes of people in earlier times to children. The argument that because so many people died in childhood parents could not afford the emotional commitment to their children that we give ours today is neatly countered by Bryson.
Imagine an episode of QI without most of the jokes, extended over many days. You have undoubtedly been educated and entertained, and they have done their best to make things coherent, but ultimately it is all fairly superficial. I had a sneaking suspicion that like the QI “elves” Mr Bryson would have had a team of research assistants working with him on this book – pity it didn’t include an editor or two.
Standard
Uncategorized

The Long Walk to the Hunger Games

There are some books that contain ideas or images which make an impression on you that is wholly disproportionate to the novel itself. In other words you principally remember not the novel but a scene or an image from it, long after the name or the author has been forgotten. One example from my early twenties was a novella describing a walking competition, entered by children only, where if the contestants slowed below four miles per hour on more than three occasions they are shot dead where they stand. It was a brilliantly realised conceit, shown through the eyes of one of the walkers, and the final scene of the winner driven mad from exhaustion remained vividly with me for years. The background and context – how this barbaric race came into being – is only ever hinted at and is kept deliberately vague. Despite this contextual vagueness the details of the race itself are carefully catalogued.
I had always assumed this story was a science fiction novel that had just made a particular impression on me, for reasons I didn’t investigate. It was a surprise therefore when I came across a collection of Stephen King novels, published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which included this very story, under the title “The Long Walk.” Re-reading the text I remained impressed with its power and impact.
I have mentioned previously that I enjoy spotting links between novels, and the recent success of the Hunger Games trilogy, the first of which has just been released as a film, prompts me to point out the links between these two works. (I wish I could claim this as an original insight, but sadly once again Google proves me wrong). The “bread and circuses” concept, where the masses are kept simultaneously subjugated and entertained by bloodthirsty gladatorial spectacles, is well established, but these stories share much more: a post apocalyptic setting with fascist rulers combining children and sudden death as a sport. The winners in each story – and there can only be one – are rewarded with whatever they wish for. Once again, as with the Harry Potter/Jane Eyre comparison, I am not suggesting any borrowing went on, and I don’t have a problem even if there was, just that I enjoy spotting links like this. But if I had to chose, and that genuinely is a silly game because I don’t, I would say the Long Walk is the more impressive, chilling of the two, not least because there is no hint of romance in the novel, and no hint of a happy ending.
Standard
Harry Potter, J K Rowling, Jane Eyre, Uncategorized

Let’s play a game…..

The name of the game is “Guess the book”.

The book I am thinking of was written by a female novelist, but published in such a way as to disguise her gender. It features an orphan who up to the age of 11 lives with relatives who treat them badly, and is bullied by a cousin. They are mistreated, have supernatural experiences, and are forced to live in a small closet instead of a normal bedroom. Eventually they leave to go to school, where one of their friends sadly dies. Yes, of course, that’s right, it’s Jane Eyre. What do you mean, Harry Potter?

When I first spotted these similarities between the two novels I felt so smug. To be fair to JKR the mistreated orphan theme is a common one, and many of the characteristics I have listed belong to the trope. There are sad little orphans throughout literature, most notably in 19th century novels were parents died at the drop of a hat. But I then made the mistake of checking with my friend Google as to whether anyone else had spotted the similarities. And of course the world and his wife has written about it, so much so that I felt the idea was embarrasingly obvious. But it was an original observation when I had it, and I can’t help the fact that everyone else feels the same.

In the long waits for the final few Potter novels to come out I read a lot of online commentary about the series – too much I believe, because in the end the final denouement held few surprises – other than Rowling’s bloodthirsty slaughter of almost every secondary character. Nowhere did I come across a Jane Eyre comparison analysis – I am sure it was there somewhere, I just didn’t read it.

For the avoidance of any doubt, I don’t give a damn that two books share some common features. Shakespeare wrote very few original plots, and he didn’t give a fig about it either – there was no attempt to disguise his sources, quite the opposite, they were often very explicitly flagged. But it is a fun game to play when you have a few spare moments – spot the similarities between two otherwise very different books.

 

Standard
Henry V, Shakespeare, Uncategorized

Henry V and George of the Jungle

 

One of my proudest moments as a parent came, bizarrely, during a viewing of the otherwise excrable George of the Jungle 2 – note George of the Jungle 2, not the Brendan Fraser production, which was bad enough. At the end of GotJ2 nasty developers are planning to bulldoze the jungle, and only our brave hero George stands in their way. He calls together the badly realised animals of the jungle (including if memory serves John Cleese as a talking gorilla – hope the pay cheque made it worth it!), and delivers a monologue that is a distant parody of Henry V’s speech to his troops on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. (If you don’t know this speech, go and read it – now. Better still go and watch it, although last time I checked the 1945 Olivier version was not on YouTube. A few years ago I found a video copy in a charity shop, and I treasure it!). It (the sub-Brendan Fraser speech) is a horridly grotesque parody, but what makes the memory stand out for me is that my son, who could only have been about seven or eight at the time, actually recognised the speech – “Isn’t that from that play you like…?”
Olivier
Yeah, I do like it, a bit, although I didn’t realise I had gone on about it quite so much. It’s an utterly astonishing piece of writing. One small example of how this speech has entered the English psyche is the “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” line, which Churchill echoed in his reference to the Battle of Britain pilots as “The Few”. He may not have referenced the line deliberately, but he really didn’t need to.
One of the things I love about this play, one of my favourites, is that is so multi-faceted. One production can make it a war-loving nationalistic propoganda piece, another with barely any adjustment can make it a devastating critique of man’s rush to war.

Now this blog isn’t going to just repeat the obvious – “Isn’t Shakespeare a good writer? – but he was, and it is worth stepping back sometimes and paying homage.

Standard
100 Best Novels Guardian list, Book review, Cold Comfort farm, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, humour, Starkadder, Stella Gibbons, Uncategorized

Conference at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, 1949

More on Cold Comfort – not that I am obsessed or anything. The original novel, Stella Gibbons’s first, was published in the early 1930’s. It has a wonderful period feel – although it is set a few years in the future, and there are glimpses of how the world has changed, with video phones and passing references to a recent war, for example. Despite this the world described is comfortably Edwardian, with strong echoes of Waugh and Saki in the opening chapters on Flora and Mrs Schilling’s life in London. The move to deepest darkest Sussex, even then surely not as isolated and backward as Flora describes it, provides a contrast to the metropolitan life she has temporarily abandoned. That contrast is kept in focus by the introduction of Mr Mybug (what a great name – he is Flora’s pest, but she has a soft spot for him nonetheless) with his gloriously stupid theories about Bramwell Bronte.

Mybug “works” in the novel as a contrast to the mad rural folk around him and as a foil for Flora, but the decision to take his character and turn it into the central theme of the Cold Comfort sequel, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, has to be one of the most bewildering a writer has ever made. The yearning to return to the Starkadders, especially when her subsequent novels had never made the same mark as her first, must have been irresistible. We all wanted to know what had happened to the farm and the cast of characters – but cared very little about the intellectuals that Mybug represented. Yet in the sequel the original cast of characters is largely forgotten or treated as marginal. We are introduced to a series of grotesque caricatures of writers and artists from Mybug’s world at whom we are invited to sneer. It is car crash writing, and how it got past an editor I will never know. It is disrespectful to the original novel, and if it has been written as fan-fic it would have been rejected by Gibbons’s estate with barely a glance.

And yet I still love it. Written in the 1950’s, with of course the world an utterly darker place, it was out of print for a long time. I originally came across it as a library copy, and pounced, desperate to know what had happened to Flora, Charles, Seth, Reuben, and the whole grisly crew. We go back to a farm transformed into a prettified National Trust venue that has been turned, utterly improbably, into a conference centre. Flora goes down to help Mr Mybug run a cultural event there for no good reason (she has a large family with Charles by now) and not much happens until the Starkadders return and all is righted. Everything funny from the original novel, including the invented language (sukebind, mollocking) has gone. But it is still Cold Comfort Farm, and we love it. We love our parents when they grow old, we love footballers who retire and get fat because of their past glories, we love the town we grew up in even though they have paved over it and erected a shopping centre – we love them despite all that, not because of it, and I still treasure the glimpses of the world Stella Gibbons unforgettably created in her original burst of genius.

Standard